Finessing The Titanic’s Memory
The lights onstage were going up and down as actors spoke fragments of lines. It was late. I was lying on the floor between the seats of the Astor Theatre and the vertical wooden slats that separate it from the rest of the Brady Street Pharmacy. I might’ve been trying to sleep. Things have been very busy lately. My energy is stuck somewhere between working a day job, reviewing shows and working on my own quasi-marketable stuff as the first Tech rehearsal for TITANIC made its long, slow migration across the stage.Pink Banana Theatre’s mini-festival of one-acts has had a long, circuitous pre-performance journey. It’s almost ready to launch. Hopefully everything is ready to go for opening night this coming Friday the 13th. I can’t speak for everyone else in the production, but my own little ten-minute piece of the show has been finely finessed and ready to go. It’s a simple, little dialogue about marriage, amnesia and time-travel set in a food court in a shopping mall in 1987. I call it "Memory."
Do It Yourself Theatre works best in simplicity. I thought I had it nailed: One man. One woman. Two chairs. A table. The dialogue is all in the acting. Simple, right?
As open auditions started Oscar Night at the Astor Theater, it became apparent that my simple little eight minute dialogue might’ve been impossible to cast. The crowd coming-in to audition for TITANIC was . . . young. It turned out that I wasn’t looking for a man and a woman for the dialogue: I was looking for a man and a woman who could pass for being in their thirties. Undergraduates. There were so many undergraduates coming in to audition. It was mildly spirit crushing: Here’s a girl who has a great deal of talent, but she’s 18 and looks 16. Here’s a guy who has an interesting presence who can deliver lines, but he’s nowhere near the right age. And then there was the older set: people who would’ve had difficulty passing for thirty year-olds from the other end of the spectrum. Somewhere around the end of the second night of open auditions a woman who looks like she could pass for being thirty shows-up . . . she’s really talented, too . . . I remember seeing her in a production of "Einstein’s Dreams" at UWM . . . but she opens her mouth to speak and she has a French accent. It turns out I’m looking for a man and a woman who could pass for being thirty who sound like they’re from the Midwest. I had no idea this was going to be so difficult.
Thanks to MySpace and Insurgent Theatre, I’ve found a couple of actors for the dialogue. She makes a living as a microbiologist. He’s a neo-pagan shaman. They’re both very talented. It's all true. I wouldn’t know how to make any of this up.
Pink Banana’s TITANIC runs the 13th, 14th, 20th and 21st at the Astor Theatre. The show starts at 8pm. It’s free. All of it. It's all free.
Posted by rfindley on 04/10 at 06:35 PM