weebelly.com

I think the highlight of my bearing witness to auditions came several years ago when a very attractive student actor at CSU performed a pole dance / strip routine for my play Only Sing for Me. Unfortunately, we were not able to cast her as my play required no women. The cheap thrill remains, though.

The auditions at CPT were quite a bit more professional and much more reserved. Alongside Beth Wood, Associate Artistic Director at CPT, two of the directors sat at a long front table covered with note pads, binders, scripts, head shots and actor’s cvs. Behind this front table, on chairs rising toward the back of the James Levin space, sat the playwrights, stage managers, and various others, including Mike Geither who is running the NEOMFA portion of the festival.

Auditions were run in one hour blocks with between 5-8 actors in an hour. An actor would come in, led by Lindsay Carter, Festival Production Manager. The actor would go to the main table, deposit his or her head shot and cv, engage in brief chit-chat, and then go out into the space. He or she would say the piece they would be performing and then go. If there was interest, a director would ask him/her to do it again with some variation: louder and farther back (projecting), softer with greater nuance, in a different enunciation or accent. Sometimes, an actor would be asked to do a bit from Shakespeare (i.e. they had two pieces prepared–contemporary and Shakespearean). Interestingly, I learned that whenever there are auditions schools with acting programs send students to practice auditioning, so on one night several students came through.

It was a machine. Actors were processed through quickly, orderly, decisions were made. I was appalled at how quickly I adapted to the attitude. I was shocked, in retrospect, at how quickly I came to view actors according to specific attributes that the play required, and not as people at all. I believe the human mind is easily conditioned to systematic modes of thought: that the brain’s approach to things is easily conditioned, in this way, to chilling itself to emotion and becoming clinical. The danger of this mode of thinking is historically documented and is not a direction I intend to go with this blog entry, but I note the attitude nonetheless.

Geither advised me that the key attribute to look for in an actor was the willingness and ability to respond to the director. So, above I mentioned the director might ask an actor to do their piece again in a certain way; this is when you see how the actor responds and how well. Regardless, here are some excerpts from my own notes on the audition to get a sense of what I was discussing above:

Forced emotion. Not a good sense of delivery. Tense and constricted.

Good comic sense. Good delivery. Good shifts: speed up and slow down. Dynamic. Good smile. Confident.

Good eye contact. Strong presence. Good delivery. Good timing: funny.

Pretty convincing emotionally for a short audition piece. Direction? Takes it. Don’t know how well she projects. Seemed to do well, but would she hold up? Expressive. Did increase volume.

And so on…

On one night there were 14 auditions. Something similar on the other, I think. My play is the only play with women, so my play had the pick for the four actresses I needed. For the men, it was a bit tougher. All three plays have men and there weren’t many men auditioning to begin with. This led to some “negotiations” amongst the directors about who got which actor, etc. This conversation was almost as interesting as the auditions.

Brian asked me my opinion on some of the characters, my main character Aisa, for instance, who really must carry the show; and another prominent character: Harry Collins. Other than that, I felt that the casting was Brian’s decision, and Brian is working with a vision of types that I can only watch develop.

This is a point, as well, where it is important to comment on the vision of the playwright as the play is written, versus the reality of the play as it is produced. When the play is written it is staged, produced, and run in the mind of the playwright. Unfortunately, that is a production that will never be visible–or if it is, the technology that will make it possible is far, far away from where I’m sitting in time. This reality means that there will automatically be a disconnect between the vision of the playwright as the play is written, and the auditioned/staged reality of the production.

One benefit of Geither’s effort to get playwrights in productions at CSU is that I confronted the disconnect between my imagined version of the play and the real production many years ago. Consequently, I have moved beyond the superficial assumptions about what my characters would “look like” or “be like” in reality to realize that they will emerge through the writing.

After two days, Brian and I came away nearly fully cast. There were two holes in the play that were filled within the following week. What followed is the scheduling of rehearsals, calendars, contact sheets, etc.

Moving on next to the first production meeting.

So, I’m always harping on Clyde at convergence to use the blog that was set-up to provide patrons an inside view of how a play is staged: from the selection, to the dramaturgy, to the actual decisions made leading to production and even a section maintained by the actors who describe their experience. This is a long way about saying that I need to put my money where my mouth is and do the same thing for my own production.

My thesis play, Patterns, is being put up at CPT. It will be staged three times on March 11, 12, and 13. Information available online at CPT. Enough of the commercial plugs. This process is exciting because it supports a vision of playwriting education that moves beyond the classroom and into the “real world”. It is a process that requires a vision to support it and the students in the NEOMFA program are fortunate to have the support of both Mike Geither, at CSU, and Raymond Bobgan, and CPT. Mike has been a strong advocate for playwrights in the NEOMFA program and has strengthened the relationship of the playwright with the local theater community, including my own staged production at convergence-continuum in 2008. I know that Mike envisions even more of these relationships as the program matures and as time goes on and partnerships emerge such as that between CSU, the Cleveland Playhouse, and Playhouse Square.

Patterns is one of three plays in what is being branded as the NEOMFA Playwrights Festival and it will provide a nice closure to my MFA experience. My two fellow playwrights: Michael Parsons and Jennifer Willoh will be staged in succeeding weekends.

During the first group production meeting it was explained that the model for the festival was Big [BOX] +; Big BOX is happening right now at CPT and I strongly encourage people to attend. The plus (+) as explained to me includes the fact that CPT is paying actors, hosting the audition process, and providing the space for rehearsals. Additional resources are being provided regarding production costs but it has been unclear to me what those are at this time.

Patterns is being directed by Brian Zoldessy, who so far has been a great person to work with. I googled Brian and learned about his extensive career on the local theater scene as well as his rather harrowing experience with a kidney transplant a few years back; which makes his contribution and work on this project all the more amazing.

I was hesitant, at first, as I’m sure he was, as it is always difficult to define the playwright/director relationship, especially when you have never worked with a person. My experience has been limited to working with one student director (Drew Kopas) and one professional director (Clyde Simon); so expanding the portfolio of directorial relationships came with reservations and concerns. Again, Brian has been great and demonstrated his commitment to the project when we met at the Phoenix Coffee in Cleveland Heights and he broke out chess pieces, diagrams, and sticky notes to demonstrate how he saw characters moving in the three dimensional space of the stage. Brian discussed configurations of the space, movement of characters within the space, concerns over where characters would be when not active in the space, and so on. Needless to say, it was a productive meeting and gave me confidence that the director was both interested and concerned about the play. It was interesting to listen also to Brian’s interest in teaching the audience to see the play based on certain light cues (which I included in the script) as well as audio cues, which I did not. Other things of interest included subtle things like the color coordination of hair of actors (related characters) in the play, and so forth. That is, Brian had not only become familiar with the play, but was crafting a vision of his own for the play. That is both delightful and challenging, as I must remind myself that theater is a participatory art form in which many people have role and that the director’s vision is just as important as the playwrights.

Soon after that meeting, I went home and examined the actors required for the characters in the play (I have 21 characters distributed across 7 actors) and looked again at the timing of their presence on stage, and set along my character breakdown as well as my description of the play:

What do you author and what authors you? One young woman’s life is explored via the metatheatrical act of play creation. By combining myth, fairy tale, personal history, dress making and play making, layers of conscious reality are laid bare and meaning in one woman’s life is prodded, crucified, drawn and quartered, and reconstructed again and again and again.

I look forward to upcoming meetings and will post more as we move along.