Building Relationships with Local Theaters

May 24, 2009 by  

When a small New York theater company reports that they received 700 submissions for 22 parts in their summer production, it is a telling factor of the odds one actor has in getting an audition, let alone a part. How does this fair for larger regional theaters that hold EPA auditions in New York? People stand in line sometimes as early as 5am to make sure they get an audition. While at the same time, some of these companies still hold auditions, through their casting directors, for actors that were submitted through agents.

Instead of only doing these cattle call auditions, an actor needs to find other ways to build relationships. What are possible ways to skip the middle man and go directly to the buyers, the directors and artistic directors?

Define Your Area
What regional theaters are in your area? Define your area. Is it the theaters that are less than an hour drive from your home? Is it two hours? Be clear so you can have a purposeful marketing and networking plan.

Research
Once you have made a list of all the theaters in your area, do the research. Go online and find out what their season is going to be. From their you can determine what roles you would be right for. Send an odd-size mailer of your headshot to the artistic director wishing them good luck on the season and that you would like to submit for a role. Read any of the plays that are not familiar. Also research the artistic director. Are they new to the area? Are they originally from your hometown? This information will help when you meet them at opening night.

Opening Night
If the production you are submitting for is later in the season, go see the other productions. Opening night would be the best night to go, as it is almost guaranteed the artistic director will be there. Don’t be shy (also don’t be pushy or rude) and introduce yourself. If this is after you sent your mailing, then the artistic director might remember you. Make the conversation about the current production and the artistic director. Do not make the conversation all about you and how you would be perfect for their upcoming production. The point of this meeting is not to sell yourself, but to begin a professional relationship with someone in your field. Don’t sound like a needy, out of work actor.

Don’t Forget the Middle Man
While doing all this work, do not ignore the casting director that the theater company hires for each production. You can find out who the casting director is in the Playbill of the production you just saw, or maybe on their website. The artistic director might ask the casting director about you once they see your mailing, or meet you, and it would be good to have a headshot in the casting office so they can look you up.

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5 days left to win the Twitter Ticket Contest. Click here to Retweet (RT) the free one ticket giveaway for the May 31st performance of New York Theatre Workshop’s Things of Dry Hours.

Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York
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Theater as Community | WNYC Leonard Lopate Show

January 9, 2009 by  

Robert Viagas, host of Playbill Radio and editor of The Playbill Broadway Yearbook, and Sandra Gibson, president and CEO of Arts Presenters, the national service organization for performing arts presenters, was interviewed today on the Leonard Lopate Show about the scheduled closings of many broadway shows this month.

What caught my ear most was Gibson’s comment on theater as community.   She uses the example of Suzie Lori Parks being a resident playwright at the Public Theater. Parks wrote her first play in five years during the first six weeks of that residency.  Gibson says this is “because she was linked in a different way to the community there”.  She wants to see a re-thinking of how to sustain artists in this capacity.  Also she is working with theaters to facilitate action that further connects the audience to the artist and show people the developmental process of the work.

I think the residency topic, and how it relates to the community, could be a interview topic by itself.  Writers seems to be the ones who a residency seems to be a natural fit, but how do residencies help connect directors, actors, and technicians to the community? What are some examples of other artist residences that have brought that artists closer to the community?

What about the idea of opening the door to the creative process?  I think this is where theaters can begin to integrate Web 2.0 technology.  By theaters using blogs, pictures and videos audience members can feel that they have a connection to individual artists and the theater as a whole.  California Shakespeare Theater seems to be doing just that.  A look at their home page has links to their facebook, myspace and twitter accounts.  Their blog has numerous contributors ranging from artists, staff and board members.  Do you follow theaters online through these various accounts?  What theaters do you know of that are using Web 2.0 to help connect the organization to the community?

Filed under: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Theater/Theatre, Web 2.0
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Artistic Diversification

December 22, 2008 by  

There has been a couple of things rolling around in my head and I think they are all connected. It started when I was talking with a fellow NYU Educational Theatre student who works in the office a major theater here in New York. He was telling me that three other major theaters let go of all their teaching artists, some that were hired as recently as September. New York City is getting sacked with major layoffs, with the national numbers reaching 533,000. The arts in general are getting hit pretty hard as it seems theater across the nation are closing on a weekly basis as the National Endowment for the Arts found that the audiences for straight plays are in decline. There are a couple of students I know from the program who are graduating with the disheartening feeling of entering into a field that is not hiring anyone. Then again does the arts really ever have enough jobs and funding?

Which leads me to the idea of diversification. If any one has been listening to the news recently many people, corporations and foundations have lost millions of money from investing with Madoff’s alleged Ponzi Scheme. Some loosing everything as they invested 100% of their savings. This reminded me of the discussion that is taking places over at the post Abolish Undergraduate Art Majors. I think artists have been sold a bill of goods that tells them they must pursue their art at all cost and be one with the starving artist persona. They must have those low paying jobs (waiter, bartender, etc.) so they are flexible for auditions and workshops. Though with those jobs its hard to pay for the actor’s life of headshots, classes, workshops and have any real sort of savings for emergencies and retirement. That’s not to even mention health benefits. So what happened if the students I mentioned above, and all the other BFA and MFA theater students who will be graduating this spring, thought to diversify themselves. What if they also took classes or got a second degree in business, computer graphics, or web design? They could take jobs in another field to build up a savings and afford to pay for all the actor necessities. If you think you can afford to be an actor because you don’t need to take classes as you just graduated with a theater/acting degree, than pause here and go read a great article over at Art of Function about university ego.

Masi Oka, who currently plays Hiro on Heroes, did something similar. Oka decided to take a risk putting his digital effects career on hold as he pursued acting in Los Angeles. “While I was working at ILM [in San Francisco], I also studied acting and I got my SAG card.” Taking a leave of absence from ILM, Oka moved to Los Angeles to immerse himself in auditions. “Six months passed and I ran out of money very quickly,” Oka says. “So when I was looking for a job, ILM told me that they had a LA commercial division, which unfortunately now is defunct, so at the time I worked from there. My intention was never to leave ILM, I just wanted to try acting while I still could. However, I had it in my contract that if I didn’t get a supporting role or recurring role in a pilot in six months I would have to go back to ILM in San Francisco. At that time I was very naive, thinking getting one pilot should be enough to know if I was going to make it as an actor or not. Anyone pursuing a creative career knows that it’s about persevering. It’s a marathon, not just a sprint. So it was a gamble in many ways.” After landing many guest spots, and bit parts in movies, he landed his current role in Heroes.

The key was Oka had diversity and was able to work on digital effects (which I am sure paid better than a waiter) to help sustain his acting career. In computer related jobs many people are capable of working from home. So once you put in the hours of working at the office, and show that you are an asset, some companies will want to keep you and will let you work from home (or give you a more flexible schedule) so that you can still pursue other careers.

So you graduate and are ready to hit the pavement, get those auditions and nail that job you have been training the last four years for at your undergraduate theater program. Instead, maybe you take the next year or two and land a job that pays pretty well and has the potential of being flexible in the future. You might say I could never take a year off to work in a cubicle. Really? The entertainment/theater industry is not going anywhere. And who knows, after that year you might have a good paying job that you can work from home and can afford to go to auditions, classes, workshops and also save money for health benefits and retirement. Believe me in that year most (if not all) your theater classmates will not have gotten so far in their careers that with a little hard work, you would be able to catch up. Remember its a marathon, so set your self up with a firm finical foundation to be able to run that marathon and enjoy the scenery along the way.

Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, Chicago, Film, Graduate School, Los Angeles, New York, NYU Steinhardt, Theater/Theatre
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Theaters To Do List

October 10, 2008 by  

Brendan Kiley wrote an article for Seattle’s The Stranger entitled Ten Things Theaters Need to Do Right Now to Save Themselves: In No Particular Order. Below is the top ten with my reactions. Th article focuses on the fringe as the main type of theater that should implement these changes. What do you thing?

1. Enough with the goddamned Shakespeare already. The greatest playwright in history has become your enabler and your crutch, the man you call when you’re timid and out of ideas. It’s time for a five-year moratorium—no more high schoolers pecking at Romeo and Juliet, no more NEA funding for Shakespeare in the heartland, and no more fringe companies trying to ennoble themselves with Hamlet. (Or with anything. Fringe theater shouldn’t be in the game of ennobling, it should be in the game of debasement.) Stretch yourself. Live a little. Find new, good, weird plays nobody has heard of. Teach your audiences to want surprises, not pacifiers.

Goes big right off the bat. I am torn by this one as I both agree and disagree. I am sure we have all seen one too many shows of Midsummers or Romeo and Juliet. But when Shakespeare is done well it is it amazing. There are also so many students every year that see a production and then are turned on to the work. Maybe we modify this recommendation that we put a cap on the amount of Shakespeare a theater company can do. One show per year?  One every other year?

2. Tell us something we don’t know. Every play in your season should be a premiere—a world premiere, an American premiere, or at least a regional premiere. Everybody has to help. Directors: Find a new play to help develop in the next 12 months. Actors: Ditto. Playwrights: Quit developing your plays into the ground with workshop after workshop after workshop—get them out there. Critics: Reward theaters that risk new work by making a special effort to review them. Unions, especially Actors’ Equity: You are a problem. Fringe theaters are the research-and-development wing of the theater world, the place where new work happens—but most of them can’t afford to go union, so union actors are stuck in the regional theaters, which are skittish about new work and early-career playwrights. You must break this deadlock by giving a pass to union actors to work in nonunion houses, if they are working on new plays.

New works are a must! I love when I see a play that I don’t know and it takes on me on a ride of discovery. I think this can also go for published work as well. Maybe poll the audience of what plays they have seen so a theater knows which ones to avoid.

I think the union/non-union issue is the bigger issue. Just coming back from a theater conference in San Francisco this is a major issue for the actors in the Bay area. Most theaters there are non-union which leaves the union actors with little opportunity to work on new works or anything at all for that matter. There is a 99-seat code in Los Angeles and a workshop code in New York. Why can’t we get a code across the board or at least in all the major theater cities?

3. Produce dirty, fast, and often. Fringe theaters: Recall that 20 years ago, in 1988, a fringe company called Annex produced 27 plays, 16 of them world premieres—and hang your heads in shame. This season, Annex will produce 10 plays, 4 of them world premieres, which is still pretty good. Washington Ensemble Theatre will only produce three plays, one of them a world premiere. (An adaptation of… Shakespeare!) What else happened in 1988? Nirvana began recording Bleach—and played a concert at Annex Theatre. By the next year, Nirvana was on their first world tour. The lesson: Produce enough new plays and Kurt Cobain will come back from the grave and play your theater.

I am not 100% sold on producing that many shows in a season. I worked with a theater company in Los Angeles that prided itself on performing two shows in repertory.  I think for the smaller theaters it can stretch its already limited personal and budget. While it might be great for all the actors who want to work, the quality pf the show can suffer, which then effects the perception of the work being done for future shows. Also these artists also have full time jobs and other major responsibilities so while I agree maybe more than three shows per season I think twenty-seven is a bit much.

4. Get them young. Seattle playwright Paul Mullin said it best in an e-mail last week: “Bring in people under 60. Do whatever it takes. If you have to break your theater to get young butts in seats, then do it. Because if you don’t, your theater’s already broke—the snapping sound just hasn’t reached your ears yet.”

I think all theater companies should have some education ties to it. That does not mean that they have this education department that creates a touring show, but they should have a connection with a local English teacher where they can come into the class and present scenes and work with the students. Most kids think Shakespeare is boring until they experience how active the text is and then kids begin to love it. If the kids connect with the visiting actors they will ask the parents to go to that theater. There is you under 60 audience members. Then it is also the theaters responsibility to do work that appeals to both young adults and their parents at the same time. That does not mean you have to produce a fairytale, but you can’t have your whole season be crazy, sexual, avant-guard theater either.

5. Offer child care. Sunday school is the most successful guerrilla education program in American history. Steal it. People with young children should be able to show up and drop their kids off with some young actors in a rehearsal room for two hours of theater games. The benefits: First, it will be easier to convince the nouveau riche (many of whom have young children) to commit to season tickets. Second, it will satisfy your education mission (and will be more fun, and therefore more effective, for the kids). Third, it will teach children to go to the theater regularly. And they’ll look forward to the day they graduate to sitting with the grown-ups. Getting dragged to the theater will shift from punishment to reward.

But when you do produce your avant-guard play that is not appropriate for children, in stead of alienating the parents give them the option of childcare so they can still come see the show. Yes, there are legal issues here that will need to be worked out, but it could be well worth it. How many theaters are offering childcare? Imagine if you were the first. You would be the talk of the PTA and the buzz around all the playgrounds. Get those soccer moms to work for you!

6. Fight for real estate. In 1999, musician Neko Case broke up with Seattle, leaving us for Chicago. (It still hurts, Neko.) When asked why in an interview, she explained, “Chicago is a lot friendlier, especially toward its artists. Seattle is very unfriendly toward artists. There’s no artists’ housing—they really like to use the arts community, but they don’t like to put anything back into the arts community.” Our failure abides. Push government for cheap artists’ housing and hook up with CODAC, a committee that wants developers on Capitol Hill—and, eventually, everywhere—to build affordable arts spaces into their new condos. (CODAC’s tools of persuasion: tax, zoning, and business incentives.) Development smothers artists, who can’t afford the rising property values that they—by turning cheap neighborhoods into trendy arts districts—helped create. To get involved with CODAC, e-mail frank.video@seattle.gov.

A definite must. Lean on the government to recognize artists as important and worth the time and money.

7. Build bars. Alcohol is the only liquid on earth that functions as both lubricant and bonding agent. Exploit it. Treat your plays like parties and your audience like guests. Encourage them to come early, drink lots, and stay late. Even the meanest fringe company can afford a tub full of ice and beer, and the state of regional- theater bars is deplorable: long lines, overpriced drinks, and a famine of comfortable chairs. Theaters try to “build community” with postplay talkbacks and lectures and other versions of you’ve spent two hours watching my play, now look at me some more! You want community? Give people a place to sit, something to talk about (the play they just saw), and a bottle. As a gesture of hospitality, offer people who want to quit at intermission a free drink, so they can wait for their companions who are watching act two. Just take care of people. They get drinks, you get money, everybody wins. Tax, zoning, and liquor laws in your way? Change them or ignore them. Do what it takes.

Embrace the idea of third space that made Starbucks what it is today. Third space is that place that is not work or home where people come together to talk, socialize and share ideas. The theater is a perfect place to do that. Make the lobby a third space. If that is not an option work with a local bar that you can encourage your audience to attend after the show. Theater is meant to create ideas and dialogue so lets give people that place to have that dialogue.

8. Boors’ night out. You know what else builds community? Audience participation, on the audience’s terms. For one performance of each show, invite the crowd to behave like an Elizabethan or vaudeville audience: Sell cheap tickets, serve popcorn, encourage people to boo, heckle, and shout out their favorite lines. (“Stella!”) The sucky, facile Rocky Horror Picture Show only survives because it’s the only play people are encouraged to mess with. Steal the gimmick.

I am hesitant to agree with this. I think there are some great shows that this can work and if a theater wants to explore melodrama (maybe Greek plays) than this might be suitable. I am not sure beyond that.

9. Expect poverty. Theater is a drowning man, and its unions—in their current state—are anvils disguised as life preservers. Theater might drown without its unions, but it will certainly drown with them. And actors have to jettison the living-wage argument. Nobody deserves a living wage for having talent and a mountain of grad-school debt. Sorry.

When referring to fringe theaters I agree there is no money to be had for any of the artists there. Work done is for the love of the art and to grow as artists. I do not think this comment should apply to the bigger regional theaters.

10. Drop out of graduate school. Most of you students in MFA programs don’t belong there—your two or three years would be more profitable, financially and artistically, out in the world, making theater. Drama departments are staffed by has-beens and never-weres, artists who might be able to tell you something worthwhile about the past, but not about the present, and certainly not about the future. Historians excepted—art historians are great. If things don’t turn around, they may be the only ones left.

Interesting comment in light of what I have been writing about the Rutgers MFA acting program. I do think more artists are going into financial debt over education which will catch up to them much like the sub-prime loans and housing bubble. Those artists will have to work more to pay off those debts and that means less time creating art. I think all artists need some education how to live financially simple.  And also be encouraged that doing the work is very important.

Filed under: Acting, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Shakespeare, Theater/Theatre
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Super Sunday

February 5, 2006 by  

Today was a good day for graduate schools auditions. I was passed on to Final auditions for URTA (that are in Chicago). Which means that I will audition for all the schools associated with URTA. If I did not get passed on then there is a Open Call where the schools are not guaranteed to be there (what I did last year).

I also auditioned for Wayne St. The audition went well. I am not 100% sure about the school. It is a see and wait. UC Irvine was a group audition that went well. My Montana audition went ok, I forgot some of my Shakespeare monologue and had to stop and start again, a first that has ever happened. My Regent audition went well too. I had a good hour long talk with them. We discussed issues I thought I might have with Regent as the schools is associated with Pat Robertson and conservative Christianity. The professor had only been teaching there six months and said he expressed the same concerns while in the hiring process. That was good to here. After leaving the schools I realized it was like Fuller with a theatre program.

The only thing I have tomorrow is my URTA Final Audition and any interviews I get with that. Cross your fingers/pray or do whatever you do as I could get zero interviews or a lot.

Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, Chicago, Graduate School
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Chi-Town

February 4, 2006 by  

We are officially in the windy city. We arrived at Midway Airport at 6:00pm and met up with Karen’s cousin Alan. He flew in from St. Louis to spend a couple of days with us. It is great for him to be here for numerous reasons, but mainly it gives Karen someone to hang out with while I am gone all day at auditions.

We took a cab to the Courtyard Marriott in Downtown Chicago. The picture is our room. What is great is we got that for $39 a night. A STEAL because Alan works for Marriott in St. Louis. I am not one to brag, but that is amazing. That was a nice surprise. After settling in, it was time for dinner. So we walked a couple of blocks (a huge task in 29 degree weather) to Pizza Uno. The place was packed! We ordered a medium sausage, Chicago deep dish for Alan and I and a personal cheese deep dish for Karen. Then we took our place at the bar because the pizza was going to take a hour to make, and by the looks of it, we were not going to get a table till then.

After finishing off a couple of beers our table was ready. Alan tried to worn us about how big the pizza was going to be, but words could not describe. The crust was three inches deep. It was literally a pie. So we sat at the small table, eating pizza, drinking beer and watching the snow lightly fall outside. A good first night in Chicago.

Tomorrow I have my URTA auditions as well as Wayne St., UC Irvine, Univ. of Montana and Regent University. For those who might want to know my audition pieces are Chris from All My Sons and Thersites from Trolius and Cressida.

Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, Chicago, Music
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