Thursday 4 – Friday 4 – June 1st and 22nd
Thursday morning was a group discussion of available director training opportunities. I was surprised how many different programs are out there – short term intensives, resident summer programs, college based long term programs and many, many opportunities for internships, assistant director positions and so on. There are very few opportunities for training that do not cost money.
Thursday afternoon we went back to our rehearsing of the John Guare play. Things went a lot better Thursday. Maybe because we had the pressure of a performance Thursday night. If you forgot (or didn’t bother to read it the first time) the Guare play is A Woman on the Threshold, Beckoning. It is 9/11 based. Anyway, we were given complete freedom as to what we did for a presentation. Some groups did a straight presentation of the play. Our group did an interpretation of how the play made us feel (don’t blame me) we took three sections of the play including one from the beginning, one from the middle and one from the ending. I thought that it came out surprisingly well. It was a movement piece. We did our presentation in the Mitzi Newhouse Theater lobby. The lobby has about a hundred lockers which are available free to put your coats, umbrella’s and packages in during a performance – neat idea. The theater side of the lobby is curved (the seats on the other side of the wall are also curved to match). The lockers are in this wall. Since the theater is 3/4 round the lockers were in a large curve – anyone standing in the lobby could not see all the lockers. We opened all of the lockers. For the middle part of the play we got the audience singing a song (I can’t remember the song right now. It’ll come and I’ll add it later.) Then five of us ran , one at a time around the curve. The fourth person closed the doors as he passed them (very rapidly). The effect was to hear a very loud sound coming towards you, pass in front of you and move into the distance again – to symbolize the falling of the towers. Effective.
Friday – interesting start to the day.
Several days ago Daniel Swee, the Casting Director at LCT was there with someone else. People were directing most of the questions to him and they wanted questions on a different topic. So they promised us a day with just Daniel himself. Friday morning was the time. The problem was that there were just 20 of us there – out of a total of 55. He said that he was offended by the low turnout. Not unreasonable but the presentation after him didn’t have a big draw and the late night partying is getting serious. People come in late. Fact of life.
That said, the up side is that the group dynamic was far different far more interactive with every one participating and it turned out to be one of the better discussion we had with anyone. Here are my notes:
Casting start six months out for a straight play and longer for a musical. Longer for the leads and shorter for understudies and spear carriers.
Directors need to know what they want in a character so they can ask the right questions in an audition and be able to make a decision in a reasonably short time period.
How do you cast spear carriers? With a lot of care actually. Many of the spear carriers also serve as understudies and the requirements may be very different.
He hates having two actors read together. One is always working at a deficit – being overpowered by the other, being upstages, being made to look bad so the other will look better. LCT hires good actors to read to give the actor the most help possible to look good. They use people who can keep their mouths closed afterwards and have an ego that lets them help the other actor look good.
The biggest problem he has with actors auditioning is not knowing the work. Not having read the play and studied the character they are being called for. They usually send out sides (five pages) for the actor to look at. He wants them mostly off book but with the side still in their hands (if they don’t have it, it makes it look like more of a performance so they should have it even if they don’t need it.) It’s hard to do rapid fire dialog if you don’t know the words. Many playwrights write intelligent characters with complex ideas and sentence structure. It’s hards to do without knowing the material.
Experienced actors and “name” actors often won’t audition for a role. They are hired for other (often commercial) reasons.
Law and Order TV show is the best thing that has happened to actors in NYC. They use a lot of new actors and they get seen.
They do open calls as required by the union but most of their casting comes from prior knowledge of the actor. They don’t invite people in unless they are under serious consideration for the role.
Schools are graduating far too many actors who will never work. They just don’t have the talent but the schools need the money. He also said that agents push actors out to get money. Years ago the agents would bring an actor along, picking roles that fit the development of the actors. Now it is all about money and that usually means TV and movies.
He is seeing fewer young actors with great roles under their belts than he used to see.
The rest of the day was spent in small group sessions learning about Grotowski – a famous Polish director. Rather than a character having an arc in a play, the performance is made up of thousands and thousands of individual moments each with its own start, run and end and event. He only directed five plays in his life – the best known was Acropolis. He died in 1999. His last play (which was never performed) was in rehearsal for FIFTEEN YEARS. I wonder what the ingenue looked like?????
We also had as session on fund raising and grants. Money is a big problem for most of these very small theaters. About 5% of us knew much about the process.
Party time afterwards.
