Will Franken
William Franken previously was seen in the role of Randy in the staged reading of What Light From Darkness Grows. He has performed in numerous roles, primarily comedic, throughout the Village and the Lower East Side, ranging from free-form experimental to Eighteenth-Century farce. Yet William's true passion is sketch comedy. Drawing inspiration from The Firesign Theatre, The Kids In The Hall, Fry & Laurie, Andy Kaufman, early Steve Martin, Blackadder, and others, he has devised a series of what he terms "one-man Monty Python-styled shows performed by an American" which he performs at various comedy venues in the Lower East Side. Aside from these live performances, William has recorded, employing the power of overdub, a series of comedy cassettes and CDs in which he supplies all the voices under the pseudonyms Firstname Lastname and Natural Outlaw. He is an astute student of accents and vocal idiosyncrasies and mimic of a variety of voices, impersonations, and sound effects, including the sound of a 33 and 1/3 record being turned backwards on a stereo. His celebrity impersonations range from the well-known to the obscure: Richard Mulligan, Christopher Walken, James Earl Jones, David Bowie, and Crispin Glover, to name a few.
William is currently at work on various writing projects, including a book, tentatively titled The Orphans, in which he lambasts what he considers to be the callousness and soullessness of the postmodern society through the co-protagonists of an erudite transvestite and a pot-smoking messiah. He has also written a screenplay, which he is currently workshopping, entitled The Greatest American Rock Myth Ever Told as well as several scholastic articles, some published and most concerned with Eighteenth-Century British drama.
William is also a pianist and songwriter, with influences ranging from the raunchy blues of Koko Taylor and Slim Harpo to the gutsy guitar rock of The Kinks and Led Zeppelin to the bubblegum pop of The Bee Gees and ABBA to the artistic melodies of The Beatles and Badfinger. Needless to say, William is a music buff and a rabid album collector. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, particularly seventies flicks in which an antihero is prominently displayed (ala Dog Day Afternoon or Electra Glide In Blue). Finally, William occasionally dabbles in the visual arts, heavily inspired by the bizarre and psychologically disturbing comics of Robert Crumb.