| | RPI Recap
It was late in the afternoon yesterday that I got a call from the Playwrights Foundation staff who for the past few weeks has been trying to find available actors for our workshop session. Turns out, one of the actresses I requested to work with was indeed available and she did attend last night, but the more pressing issue was that no male actors were able to make it.
Cold reads are tough so it can help if you have actors familiar with your work or who can easily play (in my case) a menacing husband and also easily navigate the Spanish in the script (not that there's lots, but it helps with the flow of dialog for there to be less tripping over words).
So no male actors. All of the resident playwrights were sent an email encouraging us to call / contact any actors we knew who might be able to come last minute.
I'm reminded of the time Marin Theatre Company was trying to cast the part of Lalo, a fifteen year old boy for my staged reading of American Triage. We had a hard time finding a Latino actor who looked like a teenager. At the time I wondered: where were all the young Latino actors (and by young, I mean can play teenagers to 20 something). I suspect they had moved to L.A. or NYC where there are a lot more casting opportunities.
Anyhoo, for my part I updated my Facebook status: needs one more actor for tonight--where have all the guys who can play menacing and read/understand/pronounce Spanish gone?
I did get messages to contact an actor who lives near San Jose, unfortunately it was too last minute to work with his schedule--but at least I have the name of another actor I could potentially work with, I'll file that one away for later.
So I had to make do. Which is fine because the first 15 pages of Wolf at the Door are so new [read rough] that it was very helpful to just hear it aloud and make all sorts of notes about the language (I'm looking for language that sounds too modern or anachronistic).
I asked to go second in the evening so I could hear all the actors (the ones I didn't know) before deciding how to cast the roles for the read through. And I'm glad I did go second, I think the casting worked very well, indeed.
Afterward, one of the actresses, someone I've worked with before remarked how cinematographic it is, that perhaps this play wants to be a film. Hm...I will say that I did notice how many stage directions I had in the script, something I try to limit--I don't like micromanaging actors, plus if you put too many in then they ignore them all. But as someone who's very image driven (and comes from an Imagist leaning in poetry) I find myself writing very specific stage directions, actions that convey a specific image ergo meaning or mood.
I'll keep working on it and let it become whatever it is that it wants to become. We'll see.
-M
|
| | Posted 11/4/2009 1:20 PM - 35 Views - 2 eProps - 2 comments
Give eProps or Post a Comment |
