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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.

I managed to get to four of the plays in Little Box this year, which is excellent for me considering the year I was in Little Box I only made it to one other than my own (K. was due with Henry virtually any day at that point). I’ll say right at the outset that the thing that characterizes the works that I say, almost universally, was their length.  My God do they need cut.  And mine did too.  So, I realize that there is an element of Karma involved here, as I was repaid for what I made others sit through two years prior.

I felt that all of the works that I saw were strong works.  So, I guess I should probably mention the ones that I went to see: Projecting, You Can See the World from Cleveland, Flock of Seagulls, and Waves.  I will talk about them each in turn, reflecting back, as I am working from memory now.

Projecting, by Rachel Baird, Directed by Jaime Bouvier, Featuring Faye Hargate.  Rachel is a classmate and, I felt, did a very fine job with this piece.  It is, I think, early in the development of it, but Projecting did some very interesting things with space and audience.  Perhaps the most transgressive action that I have ever seen in a theater occurred in this play when the lone character took a Polaroid of one of the audience members and then integrated it into the piece.  This action, along with its inclusion in the play, was perhaps the signature event of the piece, in that it dramatically re-shaped the meaning of the play almost instantaneously, as the lone character recalled the Polaroid photograph as a record of an event that happened substantially in the past (i.e. years before) when, in fact, the audience just witnessed the act of the photograph–thus throwing very much into doubt the sanity of the character on stage.  Baird describes Projecting thus:

Photographs are a way of telling stories, of tracking and keeping human histories on an intensely personal level. They are often the only real proof that a life has happened. Projection is a method of sharing these images; it is also a method of separating the self from the self, of hiding personal realities safely away in plain sight. Projecting is the story of one woman through photographs.

There are several points in this description that become interesting in light of the Polaroid.  For one, that the photographs are “the only real proof that a life has happened” of course begs the question, proof of what life?

The one that we really experience or the one that we imagined we experienced?  And is there a difference between the two?  No matter what your answer, the question is certainly raised by this play.  It is interesting, as well, that Baird notes that the “self can be separated from the self” using projection and of course this is precisely the reality that we as an audience encounter.  It is interesting, as well, to consider the term “Projecting” and its psychological implications in describing the state of ascribing to others the feelings that one has.  This state is usually a defensive posture and used to protect oneself, and the lone character in this play is clearly in a defensive state and has been, in some way, harmed: though how is unclear.  In the play, the more obvious use of projecting is the images that are shot onto the wall for the audience to consider, but clearly this form of projecting is deceptive, as the projection is actually moving the opposite direction, and thus makes for a very intriguing experience.

The use of props in this piece is equally startling, but not for their use in and of themselves, but rather what they represent as artifacts of the character’s life; and their representation of things that have passed by and gone to the great beyond.  I am, perhaps, more sensitized to this with the recent death of my grandmother and the even more recent death of my wife’s grandmother last Saturday.  This history of how we relate to each other and, especially, to those we love most in the world–and how we deceive ourselves is very much on display in this piece.

Jaime Bouvier does an excellent job of staging a play that could quickly run into the danger of boring the audience by its rather conventional format and approach: that is, one woman standing and directly addressing the audience.  But through various props and interactions with the audience, (including the distribution of small photographs of a stop light in various stages of its process: red, yellow, and green; with accompanying comments for meditation), this piece comes alive quite nicely and, but for a few long-winded points, is fresh and funny and very interesting.

The next piece on the menu this first evening I attended Little Box was You Can See the World from Cleveland Written by and Featuring Aaron Calafato. This one man show is a reflection on Calafato’s time as a struggling actor in New York City and the sort of Look Homeward Angel effect that this time had on his desires, ambitions, and ultimately decision to return to Ohio.  This piece was great fun and was, in fact, quite touching at times.  It was way too long, and at points I was simply lost as the title led me to believe the piece was about something that was simply not in the action itself: i.e. I’m watching a play about how I can see the world from Cleveland and yet all the action is taking place in New York, and is this a sad commentary on how we should view Cleveland.  The point of this action, however, becomes clear by the end of the piece, when he decides to return to Northeast Ohio, but there needs to be some attention to this ambiguous story line early on in the action to let the audience know where they are.  Calafato is very talented and very good at creating vibrant characters that are distinctly drawn.  There were moments, however, when it felt as if he was too aware of this gift and the characters were on stage just for the sake of his ability to go into them, rather than serving any purpose in the story.

Next on the list, and a week later in real-world time, was Flock of Seagulls by Stuart Hoffman.  I reflected, as I watched with a smile, on the fact that Stuart was the narrator in my staged reading at Little Box almost two years earlier.  Hoffman’s play was written by an actor who clearly would like to, as a character, sock the playwright in the eye.  This play was very much a meta-play reflecting on the relationship between character and action and plot and the relationship between the character and the audience and theatrical space. The play can, at times, be mind-bending as you try to sort out the relationship between the characters, the script, and the writer; and the awareness of the characters of the script, the writer, and the ways they can influence events.  Perhaps the funniest moment for me was the inexplicable repetition of an exchange between the characters who then realize that one of the pages in the script was actually a duplicate.  The moment of déjà vu that occurs is thus quickly and comically dissipated.  Other moments invoke the godlike nature of the writer, such as the crumpling of pages, the throwing of the script, etc.

When the play was over I asked Hoffman where he was going with the piece but he said he wasn’t sure.  I’d like to see more come of it than just some of the more slap-sticky happenings, as the subject offers some interesting potentialities for writers and actors to consider.

The final piece that I’ll discuss is Waves by Jaclyn Villano.  Directed by NEOMFA Playwright Michael Parsons and ably acted by Marla Williams, this piece explores grief as seen through the story of a mother who just lost her school-age daughter.

There is a rhythm to the piece which reflects the title, and there is a definite ebbing and flowing of energy from the script itself.  The whole is very ably written and emotionally engaging (and draining) and has an outlook that ruminates and then chooses life in the face of what I can only imagine as being the darkest moment in the life of a parent.

I have discussed with both the playwright and the director some of the issues that I have with the form of the piece, but that is only my opinion and the form seemed to work well-enough for most of the audience.  Three of the four plays I saw at Little Box took the form of direct audience address, which for some reason I find disconcerting.  I’ve discussed this elsewhere.

I’m not going to go into a detailed analysis of this play as it really would serve no purpose except to be as long an effort as the original to which it refers.  And this is where the point should be soundly made, as much to my own consciousness and to anyone else, that writing is a process and that, for the playwright, what is on stage early in the process is rarely what the audience sees as a finished product and that the process is long and hard and repetitive and that I myself put an audience full of people through a grinder several years back–all on the way to creating a better play, which I’m sure will be the case for all of these pieces in Little Box.