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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.

The Allen Theatre renaissance that has been discussed in Tony Brown’s article on Sunday in the Plain Dealer is indeed excellent news.  There is absolutely no doubt about how powerful is the combination of the Cleveland Play House and Cleveland State University, as well as Playhouse Square and a host of investors.  With the existing theater spaces as well as the participation of Case Western Reserve’s MFA acting program the stage is set, literally, for a formidable arrangement of spaces, players, actors, directors, technicians.  What else could there be?  What possibly could be missing from the theatrical feast?  Oh, yeah, playwrights.

Allen Theatre Ceiling, Photo by Lisa Dejong

I really do feel impassioned about the opportunity that is opening up in Cleveland and the true and powerful force this represents for Northeast Ohio and the performing arts generally.  Coupled with the wonderful boon that the Cuyahoga Arts and Culture grants have been to this region (especially in a time of dwindling corporate and foundation donors), there is no doubt that performing arts represents a form of economic engine that can drive the revitalization of our communities—and God knows that stretch of Euclid Avenue really, really needs something.  For the truth of the economic cornucopia that performing arts offers neighborhoods, we need look no further than the Gordon Square Arts district and all the work that James Levin and Raymond Bobgan and of Cleveland Public Theatre and Near West Theatre and a host of others.  As I noted in my article on Theater Impact nearly a year ago, and as was mentioned in a Plain Dealer article by Steven Litt in 2007 (Energizing Detroit-Shoreway; Theater renovations, new building at the heart of neighborhood revitalization. June 24), theater has a definite economic impact on a region and especially on a neighborhood.  A fact discussed in various NEA reports as well (American Participation in Theater, AMS Planning and Research Corporation, Research Division Report #35, National Endowment for the Arts, Santa Ana, Calif. : Seven Locks Press, 1996).  The Gordon Square Arts District is poised to raise $30 million dollars itself for the renovation and reconstruction of the theater district on the Detroit Shoreway, and this $30 million dollar investment in the downtown theater district will turn Cleveland in to a powerhouse of theater with a true potential to rival Chicago as Brown notes about the Loop theater district there.

And I am pleased that what Tony Brown wrote about nearly two years ago, with regard to this possible merger and renovation, is coming true, as will some of what I wrote about then in another article.

What I continue to be sorely, sorely disappointed in is the lack of interest in playwrights or writers in general in this process.  I have learned over the years that you don’t wait for someone to ask you to come to a meeting or party or group—that you need to get off your ass and insert yourself into the mix and into the dialog and I guess, as much as anything, I’m asking aloud who should be inserting themselves into the conversation on behalf of writers?  Cleveland State University is a member of the Northeast Ohio Masters of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) program—a consortium of 4 schools: Akron, YSU, CSU, and Kent.  The CSU campus is the home site of the MFA playwrights unit.  This unit has turned out some fine writers already, including Michael Sepesy, a fine writer who has performed his work in the New York Fringe Festival and had many positive reviews of his work at CPT.  Michael Oatman, another fine, dynamic, and outrageous writer who’s work was recently featured in the New York Times, who is now a playwright in residence at the University of Nebraska, and who co-authored Warpaint which was a finalist for the John Cauble Short Play award and was produced at the National Kennedy Center American Theatre Festival in April, 2009 in Washington, DC.  Additionally, I’ll blow my own horn briefly as having authored a play that received Best Original Script by a Local Playwright, 2008, Rave and Pan.  There are others, including Michael Parsons who runs Theatre Daedalus in Columbus, OH, along with another talented writer in Jaclyn Villano. And, unfortunately, the dark side—with other fine writers like Peter Roth and Katie Buckels leaving Cleveland to find more receptive environments, such as Carnegie Mellon and Pace University respectively.

It is just unbelievable that MFA playwrights are not being mixed into the fold along side MFA actors and new theatrical spaces—and all of this brought together in a formidable tempest of creative production.  Why is Cleveland always waiting for winners and not reaching out and grabbing hold of its own fucking piece of the fated future and forging it into a dynasty—why must we look to Chicago for a Steppenwolf and a Mamet or Gilman, etc., who seems to look sideways at New York for something else? Well, I take that back, we can learn from Chicago: learn how to generate a strong theater environment for all theater artists, so that new work emerges from new playwrights using a system of powerful theater companies.