Tech/Crew Interviews THIS Monday -OR- Tuesday

Tech/Crew interviews will take place THIS Monday and Tuesday (4/3 & 4/4) during lunch in the auditorium, but you only need to show up one of the days. Please check in with Ivy Decker or Riley Alfaro when you get there.

If you want to be part of the Durang/Durang technical crew, or know someone who might like to participate, please show up for interviews Monday and Tuesday!

Thanks, Chris

Design Workshop Lighting Designers:

Here is the LINK to the information you need to start your lighting designs. Thanks!

Parents Meeting Scheduled

The parent's meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday, April 12, 7:00-8:00 PM. Please have a parent or guardian attend this meeting. You are welcome to attend as well.

As always, check the calendar for up-to-date scheduling. Click on the event for more details.

CAST LIST!

CAST LIST

NOTE: Full mandatory cast read-through tomorrow, Thursday, 3/23 from 3:30-6:30 PM (may end early).

Congratulations to the cast of Durang/Durang:

Mrs. Sorken
Mrs. Sorken: Anabella Dominic

For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls
Lawrence: Noah Clark
Amanda: Olivia Flamm
Ginny: Karolina Skupien
Tom: Ryan Richter

Stye in the Eye 
Jake: Sammy Martin
Ma: Claire Voilleque
Dr. Martina: Tess Ferryman
Agnes/Beth: Connor Howes
Meg: Olivia Fouser
Wesley: Tucker Litch
Mae: Zelda Offermann

Nina in the Morning
Narrator: Barrett Kent
Nina: Gaby Lemieux
Foote: Tristan Muresan
James/Robert/LaLa: Dov Hirschfield
Monk: Zach Goldsmith
Maid: Rory Hays

Wanda's Visit
Jim: Kris Nine
Marsha: Ana Winner
Wanda: Katherine Wineland
Waiter: Andrew Sheiman
Mafia: Zach Goldsmith / Rory Hays 

Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room
Chris: Bowen Hampton
Margaret: Lindsay Kurtz
Melissa: Ruby Mullins-Keating
Priest: Ben Hanf
Rabbi: Eric Votto

Transition Characters: Zach Goldsmith, Rory Hays

Still Working on Cast List

Beloved actors,

We will be taking the night to work out all the kinks with casting. One thing you can all do is MAKE SURE you give us your parental consent forms by Wednesday. Hand them to one of the Directors, or to Mr. Peerenboom.

Below is the list of people who have already handed them in. If you're not on this list, do it! (Ivy Decker, Stage Manager, apologizes for any misspelled any names due to the handwriting).

Gabby Lemieux
Ana Winner
Ruby Mullins-Keiring (last name is kind of hard to read)
Bella Crepeaux
Ryan Richter
Tristan Daniel Muresan
Anabella Dominic
Katherim Wimland
Eric Votto
Benjamin Hanf
Lindsay Kurtz
Andrew Sheiman 
Zelda Offermann
Noah Clark
Dov Hirschfield
Tess Ferryman
Claire Voilleque
Karolina Skupien

Additionally, if you're not okay getting a small role that may include no lines, please contact Kris Nine. His number is (503) 922-1724.

Thanks for all the wonderful callbacks and auditions.

Sincerely,

Your directors

Callbacks!

CALLBACKS

Durang/Durang

Thanks for everyone coming out this afternoon and taking the chance, performing, being vulnerable, and being funny!... Guess what?.... EVERYONE is called back on Tuesday!!!!

What can you expect?

Be ready to go at 3:30 PM. We will be done by 6:00 PM or earlier.

Some of you will be called to read less/more often than others, which has no bearing on your chances of being cast or not.

Bring a book, or homework because there will be lots of sitting around and waiting.

See you Tuesday!

Stage Manager and ASM Announced!

Congratulations to Ivy Decker on being selected Stage Manager and to Riley Alfaro on being selected Assistant Stage Manager! Please give both of them all of your support and patience during the whole process that will be Durang/Durang. Mr. Peerenboom and I would greatly appreciate it!

I'm looking forward to working with these two outstanding individuals.

Chris

Director's Workshop #1 Date Change

The first director's workshop date has changed from Tues. 3/14 and moved to Wed. 3/15, from 3:30-5:30 PM. The 2nd workshop remains the same: Thurs. 3/16, same time.

Here is the LINK to the updated calendar.

Thanks.

Mandatory Informational Director's Meeting

Directors:

This will serve as your reminder that we have a mandatory Director's meeting THIS Wednesday (3/8) from 9:30-10:30 AM in the auditorium. Mr. Peerenboom and I will be going over some logistics regarding Durang/Durang.

Please come with your best note-taking devices!

See you then!

Chris

Description of Plays and List of Characters

Below are the list of plays, characters, and brief descriptions of each play. More info coming soon about auditions (which begin on Monday, March 20).

Here is a LINK to the calendar. Click on each calendar item for more details. It will continue to be updated and refined.

Chris
chrisrentzel@gmail.com

---

Durang/Durang 
by Christopher Durang

ACT ONE: Theater

Mrs. Sorken
Mrs. Sorken: A bit of a scattered, easily distracted rambler, who's honestly just happy to be here


For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls
Lawrence: odd, lonely kid. Thinks he is crippled in several ways
Amanda: mother of Lawrence and Tom. Extravagant, grand presence, critical of Lawrence
Tom: big brother of Lawrence. The classic jerk brother
Ginny: deaf and loud


A Stye Of The Eye
Jake: 30s, quick temper, other personality - Frank - is much more mild mannered, Jake acts more through feeling while Frank is more rational
Ma: 40-50, Jake/Frank and Mae's mother, matter-a-fact yet forgetful
Dr. Martina: typical doctor, speaks intelligently
Agnes/Beth: Brain damaged, speaks in syllables that make sense to her
Meg: 35-45, Beth and Wesley's mother, sensual and charming, detached
Wesley: spacey, mysterious, speech lacks emotion
Mae: In love with Jake, very sensual and seduc


ACT TWO: Everything Else

Nina In The Morning
Narrator: Often takes on roles of people in Nina's memories, think Lemony Snicket.
The Maid: Walks on once with a tray, no lines.
Nina: Narcissistic, lives in the past, has an absurd concept of reality, down with incest.
James/Robert/LaLa: Annoying and traumatized / Violent and traumatized / "La la la".
Foote: Former dentist, no qualms about drugging children, like an orderly.


Wanda's Visit
Jim: Bored with his "Provincial Life", gets cocky when given the right attention, genuinely cares for Marsha
Marsha: Feels ignored, realistic, the only sane person in the house from her opinion, genuinely cares for Jim
Wanda: Loves and needs attention, finds storytelling fascinating, slightly narcissistic, in love with the idea of Jim
Waiter: Just doing their job, wants to prove that they're worthy of praise, inept when it comes to real life situations
Man 1: Part of a vague mafia group out to get Wanda. One line of dialog.
Man 2: Also part of a vague mafia group out to get Wanda, has less to say about things than Man 1. No dialog.


Business Lunch At The Russian Tea Room
Chris: playwright, polite, has trouble saying no
Margaret: Chris' manager, crisp, quick, lively, a little scatter brained
Melissa: Hollywood executive, very sure of herself, name dropper
Rabbi: Orthodox Jewish man, has a beard
Priest: handsome, well-spoken, charming
Waiter (also plays the Rabbi): dry, straight to the point

---

Durang/Durang is an evening of six one-acts.  It is thus not a full-length play, but it is a full evening.

Brief Descriptions:

Mrs. Sorken is an introductory, welcoming speech to the audience in which the over-articulate, somewhat dotty Mrs. Sorken explains her likes and dislikes about theatre, her views on the meaning of life, and what the audience can expect to see this evening.  (She says: “Act I is theatre parodies.  Act 2… is not.”)

---

For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tennessee Williams wonderful play The Glass Menagerie.

In this version, Amanda is frustrated with her over-sensitive, hypochondriac son named Lawrence.  Lawrence refuses to leave the house or get a job; he’s too shy to ever met anyone, and he spends all his time playing with his collection of glass cocktail stirrers.  (“This one is called string bean because it’s long and thin,” he says.  “I call this one thermometer because it looks like a thermometer.”  “All my children have such imagination,” Amanda says with despair.)

Lawrence’s more regular brother Tom brings home a “feminine caller” from the warehouse, and Lawrence is overwhelmed by the butch girl Ginny who is deaf and shouts all the time.  Ginny and Lawrence eventually sort of hit it off, and she teaches him how to swagger and talk about baseball in a loud voice.  But then she leaves, and Tom goes off to the movies (where he has a tendency to meet and bring home sailors who have missed their boat), and Amanda is stuck forever with hopeless Lawrence.

---

Stye of the Eye is a giddy parody of Sam Shepard plays, especially Lie of the Mind, Fool for Love, a bit of Curse of the Starving Class, with bits of John Pielmier’s Agnes of God and David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross thrown in for good measure.  The audience at Manhattan Theatre Club didn’t really know those plays that well, but they seemed to accept and enjoy the play as a parody of a kind of drama – poetic, symbolic drama seeped in the myth of the American west.

The story tells of two brothers, crazy violent Jake and sensible Frank.  Jake has almost killed his wife Beth, leaving her brain damaged.  Jake and Frank are played by the same actor, causing their Ma to say to Frank: “You know, you and Jake sound so much alike that sometimes I think you’re both two different aspects of the same personality.  That means I give birth to a symbol, and me with no college edjacation.”

Beth wanders home to her blowsy, sexy mother Meg and her spacey brother Wesley.  Beth talks in nonsense syllables now, which Meg seems to enjoy.  Wesley wanders around in his underwear, splattered in lamb’s blood.  Jake and Frankie show up, and so does their sister Mae who’s in love with both of them.  Meg develops styes in her eyes, which seem symbolic.  Ma goes blind.  Mae finds a pair of cymbals and crashes them together.  Jake kills Frankie but survives.  He leaves to go further out west.  They all ponder the depth of it all while a coyote howls.

---

Nina in the Morning is a mysterious, funny play about an extremely wealthy, narcissistic woman named Nina.  Her facelift has fallen this morning, and her plastic surgeon is unreachable, on vacation in Aruba.  She has three children (all played by the same actor), two of whom keep trying to kill her; the third one is the mentally challenged girl LaLa, whom Nina keeps accusing of being “willfully retarded.”  While her servant Foote follows her bidding (including giving one of her sons a knockout shot; Foote used to be a dentist), an elegant Narrator describes past events in Nina’s life which she recalls and sometimes relives (many seductions, especially of chauffeurs and house painters).  Finally one of her children shoots her in the shoulder, and Nina becomes discouraged and considers suicide.  On the other hand, it’s near lunch time.  She’s left debating to herself: “Death… or lunch.  Death…. or lunch.”

(From Durang: note on Nina.  “Because the earlier two plays were parodies, many audience members thought this was a parody, and due to its wealthy characters and formal speech, they thought it was maybe a parody of Edward Albee dramas.  It isn’t really.  It is its own strange thing.  If anything, it kind of resembles the deadpan Gothic world of the artist/writer Edward Gorey, though that connection was not consciously pursued on my part.  Anyway, it’s a quirky piece, though I think funny.”)

---

Wanda’s Visit tells the story of a suburban couple, Jim and Marsha, who are starting to feel a little stuck in their marriage after 13 years.  Not unhappy, just… restless.  Jim gets a letter from an old high school girlfriend named Wanda, who asks to come visit.  Jim is excited by the prospect of this visit, but Marsha dreads it (but doesn’t say so).  Wanda shows up, and she’s quite a handful.  Red haired and vibrant, wearing bright colors and talking non-stop, Wanda is warm and overwhelming.  She hugs Jim a lot and keeps telling Marsha how great he is.  Then she bursts into tears, saying that in high school everyone presumed she and Jim would get married.  Jim is totally shocked and asks “who presumed this?”  “Well, everyone,” says Wanda.  “My mother, my father, me, everyone.”

Wanda proceeds to chronicle for them the lengthy and endless details of her years of promiscuity, her bad choices in men, and her getting facial surgery to avoid detection from some kingpin of crime.  In the morning Wanda cons Jim into giving her a back rub, which Marsha walks in on.  Jim is finding Wanda nerve-wracking, and yet he’s also flattered by her interest in him.

Finally, they all go to a restaurant where Wanda is taken out of their lives in a surprise development, and Jim and Marsha are left to think about the visit: it stirred them up, kind of, it encouraged them to take an aerobics class together; now if only they were happy.

---

Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room tells of a playwright named Chris who’s doing his laundry.  His agent Margaret reminds him that he has a meeting about a possible film writing job with a hot shot movie executive at the Russian Tea Room.  Chris goes to the meeting, and the Russian waiter is mysteriously hostile to Chris.  Then Melissa Stearn arrives.  She talks a mile a minute, she initially thinks Chris is the playwright Craig Lucas, and she is filled with countless opinions and ideas, with little alarming insights into her personal life.  (“I’m involved in six lawsuits right now, one of them against my mother.  I’m gonna make her beg.”)

She then tells Chris the brilliant idea she’d like him to turn into a screenplay: “It’s about a Catholic priest and a rabbi, who fall in love and then, O. Henry-style, each has a sex change without telling the other one.”  Chris is speechless at this, and she then pitches several more alarming ideas.  Finally Chris gets out of there, but later thinks how needs the money, and we start to see inside his head as he tries to write this “priest/rabbi” movie.  Finally, he becomes overwhelmed and decides to turn the project down and just focus on the honest task of matching his socks in the laundry.  The fictional Priest and Rabbi come over to help him match socks, as the play ends.

---

NOTE: The cast size above relates to presenting all six plays in Durang/Durang.  Individual one acts among the 6 have smaller cast requirements.  Mrs. Sorken requires 1 female.  For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls requires 2 male, 2 female.  A Stye of the Eye requires 3 male, 4 female (though it could be done with 3 female, if you doubled Meg and Dr. Martina).  Nina in the Morning requires 3 male, 1 female.  (At MTC they added a second female to play a silent maid, but that’s optional.)  Wanda in the Morning requires 1 male, 2 female.  Business Lunch at the Russian Tea Room requires 3 male, 3 female, at least as done at MTC where we had an actress play the Rabbi.  If you choose to double cast the waiter as the rabbi, that would make the cast be 3 male, 2 female.