Recognition

I walked into Starbucks on Mercy Road last summer, and the young barista there said, "Weren't you the guy in 'The Crucible' at OnStage in Chula Vista?" We little theatre types just live for those moments.

By little theatre type, I don't mean shorter than 5'7" (which I am). I mean, rather, a segment of that class of human beings who make a practice of standing up in front of relative strangers for little or no money trying to entertain them. The little, or community, theatre segment specializes in putting on plays, while other segments of the class perform in local bands and orchestras, put on dance recitals, or become street performers. None make a living at it, and if they do, they belong to the more select though rarely richer class of professional performers. No, I mean the local folks who just get up and implicitly say, "Look at me!", a phrase my wife has said belongs on my own nonexistent coat-of-arms.

I read once that it's a good thing that local theatre exists, otherwise shallow, self-centered people would have no place to go and mingle. My guess is that the author of that pith, suffering from severe stage fright, botched an audition early in life and never again tried to get up in front of an audience. He's probably ugly, too. And a critic. While I've met my quota of self-centered folk in the pursuit of the perfect amateur performance, I don't think they're any more common than they are in other walk of life. Actors are dependable and undependable, smart and foolish, organized and scatterbrained, beautiful and ugly, just like other people. They just seem to take all these qualities to extremes. That's why they're so fun to be around -- colorful people are far more entertaining than those who live in black-and-white.

I like to think of community theatre, little, local, whatever you want to call it, as the heir to a long human tradition of physical storytelling. Once, almost everyone was an actor and storyteller, just as a majority of people were musicians. In the same way that the phonograph impacted universal musicianship, though, so did movies and television decimate live storytelling. Why learn to play an instrument when your CD or MP3 player can bring professional musicians right to you? And, why put on a play when you can sit in the comfort of your living room and see anything from Tennessee Williams to the Farrelly Brothers just by pushing a button? It's seductive, and it doesn't take any work.

And that's the problem -- it doesn't take any work. Unless you've tried to play the cello, for example, you can't really appreciate how amazing Yo-Yo Ma's performance of the Bach Cello Suites really is. You can listen to it and enjoy it, but you can't really appreciate its genius unless you've tried it yourself, even at a beginner level.

And there's the beauty of performance and storytelling. Coaxing a pleasing sound from an instrument takes quite an investment in time. Telling a story, now... That's something that anyone can do, right from the start. Just imagine going to a cocktail party and having someone ask you about yourself. Even if you don't talk much, given a little encouragement (and a couple of drinks) you won't have much trouble after the first few minutes in telling a good story. Or two. Or five.

All theatre is is telling the story, preferably without the cocktails. You should try it.

There's a San Diego New Perspective play festival coming up in June featuring the work of San Diego playwrights, directors, and actors. My only connection with the organizers is that I did a couple of shows with two of the organizers. When I heard about auditions for the festival, I decided to go to the auditions, which took place last Saturday and Sunday. If I can keep up the blogging momentum, I'll tell you about how it goes.

Auditions

So, let's talk about auditions. You can, and actors do, spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on training and workshops to learn how to get the edge in auditions. It's no different, though, than any other job interview. The only real difference between an acting audition and other "evaluations" is that the evaluator is accepting or rejecting not something you've done but you as a person, or so it seems. Never mind that they needed someone in their mid-30s over 6 feet tall. This may explain why professional actors who audition multiple times every week seem to be a bit more neurotic than the general population. Or, it may just be that more neurotic people are drawn to acting. Who knows.

In any case, the best way to do auditions is to be completely unconcerned with the outcome, a far easier task in community theatre than it is in professional theatre where a paycheck is involved. The worst thing that will happen in community theatre is that you won't get a part. The time you've spent auditioning, though, has not been wasted. Every time you get up in front of people it gets easier, so auditions are just like taking a workshop only cheaper. Even if you decide after lots of failed auditions that theatre is not for you and that maybe ballroom dancing or Toastmasters is more your cup of tea, you'll do better at whatever you do with those auditions under your belt.

You generally must have a head shot and resume. That's easier than it sounds these days now that almost everyone has access to a digital camera and an inkjet printer. I'm certainly not minimizing the work of professional portrait photographers; it's just that the only reason for the head shot and resume is to remind them who you were after you do the audition. It's not even as minimally important as a resume in job hunting -- there you're hoping the resume will get you in the door. In community theatre, almost anyone can get in the door and be seen. They probably won't even look at the head shot and resume closely until after you're finished auditioning.

For the New Perspectives festival, the auditions were held at Swedenborg Hall on Tyler Street just north of Washington Street and east of the 163. I went on Saturday, the first of two days of auditions, and showed up about fifteen minutes early which is my habit when auditioning. I'd rather get signed in and then get a feel for the location and venue than stand in line. There are different schools of thought about being among the first to go on versus being among the last. I tend to think that it's all luck of the draw anyway, so you might as well get out there and do it. As it turned out, that was a good call this time.

There will be twenty-four one act plays put on during the festival encompassing about 60 roles, providing a wide-range of character types. As a result, unlike auditions for a single show in which the director is matching a limited number of roles, these one-act plays encompassed young and old, male and female, serious and comedic roles. The directors of the plays and some of the writers were in the "audience," and the actors waited in the next room to be called.

At first, directors wanted to cherry-pick actors to read "their" play. As I was number four in sign-ins, I was one of the first to go on. I read one scene with a young actress and was almost immediately called back by a different director to read with the same actress a different scene another play. This was the benefit of going early. As more actors arrived, the directors no longer had the luxury of making choices about who would read which scene -- as the day went on, actors were assigned to scenes with the goal of ensuring that everyone got heard rather than by careful choice. Still and all, the organizers did a good job of ensuring that all actors who showed up were allowed to read at least twice.

Basically, you were handed a "side," or script, and allowed a reasonable time to look it over. Some groups even had the luxury of rehearsal time as they awaited their turn in front of the group directors. Once you got on stage, you were introduced by name and sign-in number. You read your part and when finished, gave again your name, number, and phone number, presumably so that directors who liked you could contact you.

While the process was never explicitly explained to the actors, the assumption was that each director was making his or her own decisions about casting their own one-act play. The directors would then contact the actors directly and offer them either a part or another opportunity to read for the part in a more leisurely environment. I have had both opportunities offered to me, and I'll write more about them when the dust settles.

Callbacks

After auditions come either offers or callbacks. Accepting an offer is easy -- you wouldn't have auditioned if you hadn't wanted a part. Occasionally you are offered a part you hadn't anticipated, but as Ned Beatty said, "There are no small parts, only short actors." Or something like that. When I auditioned for "The Crucible," I had aspirations to play the Reverand Hale, a major tortured character. During auditions, though, they liked my "Cheever," a small comic relief part, and that's what I was offered. The truth is that every role is a gem, and a perfect little diamond is better than a big chunk of glass. In any case, I usually take what's offered, because in planning and rehearsal the show belongs to the director. It only belongs to the actors once it's being performed.

Even with my low-stress approach to acting, callbacks probably cause more pain than any other part of the process, including performance. The reason is that in callbacks, you are no longer the faceless piece of "talent" who may be what they're looking for, or maybe not. When you're auditioning with a large group, "res ipsa loquitur," as the lawyers say, "the thing speaks for itself." Your performance is what it is, for better or worse, and there's no blame if it's not what they're seeking. It could be that you're the wrong age, the wrong height, the wrong weight. You could just lack chemistry with others the director has in mind. It could be that the director has already chosen someone they know for the part and is doing auditions just to say they did. Or, it could be that you just weren't good enough. The point is that it could be anything, and you can console yourself with the knowledge that you probably just weren't right for the part.

Callbacks, now... In a callback, the director is implicitly saying that you might just be good enough, but there might just be someone who's better. Even if you're not getting paid for the part, you've got a lot more personal manna on the line, and it's a much greater disappointment if you're not chosen because, after all, you just got to meet the person who bested you. While I always let it go and don't take it personally if not chosen, the truth is that it takes me longer to let it go if I'm rejected after a callback.

When the director phoned me to see if I would be interested in attending a callback, I accepted and immediately did a little Internet research on her. Again, just like a job interview, research pays off. In this case I found that she was one of the key organizers of the New Perspective Festival and that she is the Artistic Director of her own theatre company -- this gave me a sense for where she was coming from. It's not going to change my performance, but being comfortable going in is half the battle. Also, the next day, I got a call from another director offering me a part in another one of the plays without a callback, so having that in my pocket made it far less stressful than a normal callback would have been.

We showed up at her home in La Jolla last night, we being about three women and six men vying for one female and two male roles. It's a very interesting study in personalities as you are introduced around a group that contains both competitors and castmates (assuming you get the role). It's fun if you're a people-watcher; those who know each other emphasize their existing bond, and outsiders either socialize or withdraw. Either is perfectly acceptable behavior, with socialization helpful when you read scenes with others and withdrawal helpful to privately study and better understand the script and its intentions. The point is not that people do one or the other, but that they seem to do _more_ of it than they would if not under stress.

Given the script, in this case a short one-act play of about ten pages or so, you have a chance to think about what the author had in mind for the characters and situation, what the director might be thinking about in terms of casting, and whether the characters are real enough to try to inhabit their skins -- and there you can probably see a glimmer of my own "method." It helps, both in preparation and in doing the scene itself, to be a fast reader. You want to be able to read the scene, or in this case the entire play, think about it, run through it in your own mind, and then read it again for more insights. I'm a fast reader, which makes up somewhat for my terrible memory that l'll talk about later. I had enough time to go through the steps above before reading the scene, and then to do it again while I waited to read once again.

A group of two men and a woman read the scene as the three characters, then the men switched and immediately did the scene again in the other male role. We then had time to stew in the other room, read the script again, talk amongst ourselves, and then do the scene again, twice, with a different pair of actors. Everyone has their own process -- if asked to do a scene again, I try for a different take on the character figuring that it's better for the director to choose from a range of interpretations than to try to "get it right" since you don't know what's "right" to begin with, nor does the director in all likelihood. After about an hour and a half of callback, we were excused to go home and sit by the phone, as we had been told that we'd get notification that evening.

All this talk about stress may be misleading; the truth is that doing auditions and callbacks is actually fun. There's just enough adrenaline about the situation to key you up, but not so much that you get exhausted afterward. It's even more enjoyable when the actors you're reading with are good, as the scenes tend to be more real, and you can see the characters starting to come alive even after reading the scene a couple of times. Those moments when characters on paper become flesh and blood -- those are really what make the acting process worth it.

The call came in after about an hour -- I've got the part, now my second in the Festival. Now to start learning lines before setting another foot on stage.

Learning Lines

The single most common question I get from friends who don't do theatre is, "How do you learn all those lines?" Though glib, the real, honest answer is "One at a time, over and over." While auditioning can be scary, rehearsal exacting, and performance exhilerating, learning lines is the slogging through the muck that the army does before the battle is joined. It's all about getting there.

We all have personal gifts in various flavors; unfortunately a steel-trap memory is not one of mine. If you're introduced to me, I need to work hard to remember your name, and chances are that 15 minutes later it will have escaped me. Part of it is mental filters. I'm pretty good at describing what happened and why, the analytic part, but when it comes to the names, the colors of the room and carpet, or the clothes people were wearing, I'm usually at a loss. This is true in the discipline of learning lines as well. After reading a script even for the first time, I can sense the arc of a scene and have a good feel for how the characters fit together. However, even after reading a script ten times during the course of an audition or callback, I couldn't repeat even a fraction of the words from memory.

As I was preparing to go off to college many years ago, my father told me, "Ten percent of your success in school will be from brainwork; ninety percent is from buttwork, sitting there and studying." He also told me that a land war in Southeast Asia was a good idea, but that's another story. He was right about studying, though; you just have to sit down and do it. How you do it, though, depends on how your brain is wired.

When I did my first show with lots of lines in the '70s, I sat with the script, read it, re-read it, and then went through it with a piece of paper covering part of the text, going down through it line-by-line. It was painful, but it was all I knew to do. Not having the luxury of a roommate or partner who would run lines with me, I finally went out and bought a pocket tape recorder, which turned out to be the best thing I could have done. Recording the script so I could play the cues then respond and have immediate feedback on the accuracy of the response was perfect for me. Somehow the auditory process works better for me than the visual in smacking the lines down into my mid-term memory. That process hasn't changed for me, although I've graduated to a digital pocket memo recorder now that they've gotten so inexpensive.

The festival shows are ten to fifteen minutes scenes and therefore simple to learn as shows go. The most important thing for me to do is to start early, as in immediately, in learning them. Others' mileage may vary, but for me the character evolves as the lines are learned based on the script alone even before meeting or reading with the other actors. The first time I stand on a stage with my counterparts, I want to have a strong sense of who the character is. He will continue to evolve, of course, when interacting; his mannerisms and inflections will be dependent on the words and actions of the other characters in the scene. Still, though, his core is formed early on, and that can't happen without knowing the lines.

I got an email today from a third director requesting my presence for another set of callbacks on Sunday for a third play. We'll see how that goes.

Callbacks Redux

I talked about callbacks earlier, but I'll revisit the subject now that I've just returned from a second callback session with a different director. The previous callback I discussed mirrored the process of the original auditions for the New Perspective Festival in that each group read only for the evaluators; the other actors did not see the earlier performances. Today's callback session was held at Hoover High School in the auditorium, and the assembled actors had the opportunity to see each other perform. This makes for a very different audition environment.

When auditioning privately for a director, each actor must decide who the character is in the script, gather or invent enough backstory to give him life, and them be him on stage. It's a private, personal process, trying to match as much as yourself as you can to the character you envision. The more you can do it, the more believable you are.

When auditioning publicly, each actor to read the character gives him a little of his own life force, and that anima seems to remain in the character even when the next person reads him. By the time the scene has been read multiple times, the character has taken on a life of his own, and it seems to be much harder to make him your own. The result in terms of auditioning is that you have to work harder in a public audition to differentiate your interpretation of the character from that of other actors, especially when you're reading him late in the audition process.

For this particular callback, the director had called a group of men and women to read two short plays she will be directing for the Festival. The first play was read all the way through by one group, then the second play by another group, then the first play by a third group, and so on. As the afternoon wore on, we started reading shorter excerpts to allow mixing and matching of actors in the different roles. The look of a group and the chemistry among them is every bit as important to a director as the individual talents of the actors, and by holding her own separate callback this director was creating an experiment in which she was able to change a variable (actor) to see how the group chemistry changed.

For my part, I read the first play with the first group, so I had the luxury of defining one of the characters for the first time. That was easy. By the time I read the second play, though, late in the game, the new character had already been interpreted by almost every male actor present. My response was to make him unique and make him big.

Big is pretty much always a good idea in auditions; almost every director I've worked with says it's easier to make an actor tone it down than it is to make them bring it up. Unique, though, has its dangers. By finding an interpretation that's outside the (now established) norm, you risk making the character something completely wrong in the director's mind. On the other hand, you may show the director something he or she hasn't thought of. Despite the possible pitfall, that's my process, and I'm sticking with it.

The director will be in touch.

Scheduling Rehearsals

The scheduling of rehearsals is a seemingly simple task that is actually quite complex. Any number of factors make it difficult including the individual actors' outside schedules, the kind of show it is, scene rehearsals involving only part of the cast, and (in this case) multiple simulaneous shows.

Managing any kind of activity involving unpaid volunteers is a challenge, and it is doubly so when discipline is required. I found this out when directing a church choir whose members' dedication ran the gamut from hard core to merely marginal interest, and whose talent ranged from almost professional quality to painfully tone-deaf, with only a minor correlation between the two qualities. The director of such a group must find a balance between discipline, to produce quality, and flexibility, to get and keep the volunteers. My own approach was to push them to the point where I encountered resistance and then work at that boundary, pushing a little harder for important performances.

Volunteers participate because they want to, not because they have to, and that is true of community theatre actors as well. On the receiving end of this equation, I act because I enjoy it. If I know that a certain theatre company doesn't respect actors' time or that a particular director has a history of making life miserable for actors, I'll make a point of avoiding them, as will others. Thus the director of a local theatre production has to be more gentle toward their actors as well as their tech folk, no matter how much they would prefer to drive hard toward perfection.

In auditions for this and every other production I've encountered, it is expected that the actors will adjust their personal lives to be present for all major rehearsals and, of course, performances. I've got a pretty good idea of what my travel responsibilities will be for work, and I only audition for a show when my work schedule will accommodate it. That said, emergencies do come up for everyone with their work, their families, and their health. The initial schedule estimates given to director by actors will inevitably change, forcing rehearsal schedule change as the show progresses toward performance.

Just as a side note, it gets even more interesting when an actor playing a major character has to miss one or more performances. Rarely are there alternates in community theatre. In one recent show I was in, an actor playing one of the lead characters was in an auto accident shortly before the show began. Luckily for the show, she was a trouper who covered her bruises with makeup and went on despite aches and pains.

In another show I did, a lead actor had to miss two performances that had significant advance ticket sales. The director frantically searched for someone who knew the role but was unsuccessful. She ended up drafting a backstage tech, also an actor, who had seen the show at rehearsal and performance. She scheduled two mid-week rehearsals, then went on with the show. It was one of the most interesting shows I've experienced, with yellow sticky notes strategically placed behind props and flats for her benefit, "steering" the stand-in toward their proper position on stage, and numerous not-so-subtle line promptings after pregnant pauses like "So I'll bet you're wondering why we're all here..." But...the show went on.

The nature of a show also affects the rehearsal schedule. A musical, for example, will generally have dance rehearsals, choral rehearsals, separate dramatic rehearsals; they'll then put it all together later in the game closer to performance. When dealing with children, rehearsal schedules have to accommodate early school nights. With highly technical shows or those with elaborate staging, more rehearsals are needed to fine-tune these features.

Sometimes when a show has a large cast, the director has to schedule rehearsals around certain subgroups of characters that have scenes together. The upside of this is that actors' time is respected. While there's always some sitting around waiting to rehearse or get on stage, too much sitting around is a sign of bad time management on the director's part. The downside of this is that it becomes more like film acting where the scenes have no continuity, appearing in an order determined by schedule, not the playwright. In general, directors choose a middle road where scenes and parts are rehearsed early in the process, but toward performance the show is run from beginning to end at each rehearsal regardless of the "wasted" time.

This Festival is introducing yet another complexity into scheduling: each director is responsible for coordinating the rehearsals for their own show. With twenty-four shows and actors in multiple shows, this gets interesting fast. The first director to send me a rehearsal schedule was Dori. As a result, she got first dibs on my time between now and performance, picking Thursday and Friday evenings from 7:30 to 8:30 pm. Carla will be next, and she will carve out another couple of nights a week. Sally is still deciding on her cast, holding another set of callbacks tomorrow. Her two shows have four to five people in each cast, so she will face a very difficult task finding days that fit the actors' schedules and existing conflicts.

Whether I end up in one of her shows or not, I wish her luck in scheduling rehearsals for all those folks -- she'll need it.

First Reading

You've been through auditions, you've survived callbacks, and you've gotten the role; these are stressful but fun activities. They have all, though, just been preparation for the first reading; this is magic. The first time you read through a scene with the other actors who will be playing the roles in performance, you finally get to live the show. It's not exactly what it will be, but its form is discernable and its substance tangible. It may still be a golem formed of mud, but it lives.

Tonight Lynne, Thomas, and I read The King's English for Dori for the first time as a cast. Like any bit of magic, though, it can be disconcerting. I had worked on my lines, not enough to abandon the script, but enough that I could take just quick looks at it, and I had a sense of who "Ernest," my character, was. Dori had a slightly different vision, and it was almost like walking into another house built on the same plan as yours; the fact that it's almost the same is more jarring than if it were completely different. My Ernest was more gruff and New York-ish; hers is closer to my actual personality. As Ernest is not someone I'd care to be around, that presents me with a somewhat schizoid dilemma, but no matter. Her Ernest and my Ernest are still the same character, saying the same lines, but it's like fraternal twins, similar yet distinct.

We actually had a head start on the scene, as we three had read together at her callback, so Dori had us jump right into a reading with movement, revealing her take on things when we were through. This is where Ernest went through his minor transformation and I found out that I would have to do an unexpected amount of physical comedy. Basically the scene begins with dialog between me and my "wife," then I am taken out of the scene while she and another character have lengthy dialog. I thought I would be invisible to the audience during that time to avoid taking focus from the other actors, but Dori wants me visible, so my new challenge is to come up with several minutes of physical comedy that complement the other actors' dialog.

After our reading and hearing Dori's Notes (notice that the word is capitalized -- director's Notes are the Word of God), we ran the scene again with no scripts and no dialog just to get a sense of the physical movement and to see if our physical interpretation matched hers. Then Dori asked us to read the scene without movement. We pulled up chairs, sat down, and waited for the first actor to start the scene. And waited. And waited. Then looked over at her to see her intently reading the script to herself. "No," Dori said, "aloud..." The ensuing laughter seemed to be the final glue that bound us together as a cast -- it was our first anecdotal moment.

We ended the evening by discussing rehearsal schedules and deviations resulting from our other time requirements. There are more rehearsals than I had expected, but it's not a bad thing. The first rehearsals take the scene and file it down; subsequent rehearsals are coarse and then fine sandpaper. When you get to the point that you're using a polishing cloth, you are truly ready to perform.

Sound Cues

In theatre, sound is a way to enhance the suspension of reality. You as the audience want to believe you're in an English manor house at night, or in a train station, or on a cruise ship. Sound helps you do it.

There was a time when all theatres had extensive collections of devices for the production of sound effects such as boxes of glass, creaking hinges, and such. Today, though, the sounds, from the music that plays while you read your program awaiting the start of the show to the effects that imply phantom locations, are recorded. Every theatre company has one or more sound techs who have a library of sounds and can deliver a tommy gun or a steam whistle on a cut for use at a particular time during the action.

For the Festival shows, each director is on their own. Dori is directing two shows, The Thing and The King's English. The first uses a short music cut at the beginning and then replays the music through to the end later in the scene. The second takes place in a train station, and there are two places where train noises are part of the drama.

She had the music and the train noise, and her first thought was to have the tech crew play the cuts and then rewind or forward to the right spot. When it's time for performance, though, you want to require as little as possible of the tech crew, especially when they will be servicing eight productions each evening. I therefore volunteered to create separate cuts that did the fade and such automatically when played.

This is not a hard process, nor does it require expensive software. The simplist tool for the job is usually the best, and I recommend Audacity, a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You just put your cut into the window, and you can do all the little things required to louden, soften, chop, or repeat parts of a sound cut. Highly recommended, and the price is right.

We'll see if she likes the job I did. If not, I'll have a laptop and can do modifications and create new cuts on the fly, then cut a CD on the spot. Magic.

Rehearsal Space

One of the biggest challenges facing most theatre groups here in San Diego and in most urban areas is finding space. There are far more aspiring theatre companies in this city than there are venues in which to perform, let alone make a permanent home.

Most theatre companies start with a few folks sharing an artistic vision. It might be a message such as an emphasis on women's issues, a shared cultural background as exemplified by Asian-American Repertory Theatre, or an interest in putting on experimental or avante garde productions. It might even be that the group just wants to control the entire process from play selection all the way to performance. Whatever gravitational forces bring people together as a company, their common first challenge is finding a venue.

For you who have only enjoyed theatre from the audience side, it may not be obvious that most shows take far more floor space than just the seats and the stage. While it's certainly possible to do minimalist shows in almost any space, the majority of shows require some kind of constructed set and a panoply of furniture and other set dressing, props, costumes, lighting, and sound equipment. All this takes space. Add to this the need for room to build, install, and test everything prior to the show, and you can see that things get tight very quickly. Once the show is done, a certain amount of this accumulation is useful in the long-term for other shows, so long-term storage becomes an issue as well.

And, I haven't even gotten to rehearsal...

Some companies do have more or less permanent homes, either owned, leased, or used with permission, but this now adds a layer of business management on top of their purely artistic goals, not to mention increasing the ticket prices required to make the rent. There is a good reason that you have to pay over $50.00 for tickets to the Old Globe or La Jolla Playhouse, and this, in turn, drives a need to bring in bodies at these prices. The shows must have consistent quality, and the shows must be crowd-pleasers, generally with "name" actors in the major roles.

Other companies with permanent homes depend on grants, regular donors, or civic support, such as OnStage Theatre in Chula Vista. Sadly, the disappearance of La Mesa's Ben Polack Art Center as a result of the city's reconstruction of its City Hall complex without a theatre rendered Lamplighter's Theatre homeless and was a loss to the entire San Diego theatre community. Yet other theatre companies have permanent space as a result of cooperation with schools or churches, such as Vanguard Theatre in Point Loma, an outreach program of the Westminster Presbyterian Church that has been putting on performances in its spaces since the 1970s.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have groups without any permanent assets or home who must find a place to perform, generally a shared space. 6th@Penn Theatre has been a stellar example of a business model that offers such groups a low-cost, common environment, but even this can be out of their financial reach.

"Homeless" theatre groups must be as creative offstage as onstage in the search for performance space. I've been to shows in bars, restaurants, schools, and parks. They sometimes use the facilities of more established theatres whose in-house companies are between productions. They keep props and set dressing in storage lockers or with sympathetic businesses or friends with extra rooms or garages. They rehearse in living rooms and coffee shops; for one show, we rehearsed in a building scheduled for demolition in which the walls and ceilings were pockmarked with sledgehammer holes. They just do what they have to do to create the performance.

But...to the Festival at hand. As a brand new San Diego entity, the New Perspective Festival has all the challenges of a homeless group compounded by the number of simultaneous shows looking for rehearsal space. While Swedenborg Hall is the venue for the performance, it is a multi-use space and will only be available full-time during the week before the show. There will be one all-day run-through of every show on May 31, and as the first time all the shows and groups have come together, it will be a very interesting day for all.

Each director is responsible for his or her own preparation, and in the meantime, Dori is working The King's English and The Thing in the common room at an assisted living facility. Carla had us do the first reading of Supression at a table outside a Starbucks. I'm sure that other directors are also being quite creative as well as they look for space to rehearse.

So... If you know of any space available for the Festival directors to use, let me know, and I'll pass it on. You'll make at least one group of actors and their director very happy. Oh, and if you know of a 4000 square foot space for rent at fifty cents per square foot, I know of at least one theatre company that is ready to get off the streets and settle down in a home at last.

Costumes

Everyone loves dressing up, and actors are no exception. On the day when costumes are first tried and fitted, you can hear the giddy giggling from even the most jaded performers. Part of it has to do with the additional flesh on the bones of the characters provided by proper dress, but truthfully, it's just fun to try on odd clothes and see how different you look.

Established theatres like the Old Globe have racks and racks of clothes that can be artfully reused in multiple productions. At one time I attended a function at the San Diego Art Institute at which the Old Globe allowed the SDAI management to "borrow" medieval costumes for the evening. There was no shortage of jerkins, pantaloons, cloaks, and caps, all richly beaded and embroidered to festively clothe the group.

If you can't find it in-house, you can always rent it. If it's not available at a theatrical costume shops in San Diego, our proximity to showbiz central in Los Angeles makes it easy to find almost anything you can imagine at the major costume rental facilities there. These vast storehouses are not cheap, but they have collected thousands upon thousands of costumes. Luckily the audience is not close enough to see the numerous alterations and odd seams that have accumulated over the years as a nip here or a tuck there was added to accommodate one of the many actors to inhabit the outfit. If the clothes could talk, they would have an amazing history. I wore a rented admiral's hat in one production -- the kind that Horatio Nelson wore. It was authentic, threadbare in place and modified over the years, but the lining inside said it came from the U.S. Naval Academy Uniform Shop, which means it was at least sixty years old and probably older.

More often you'll see costume bits that look authentic, especially from a distance, but are replicas, sometimes altered to make them look right or even completely handmade. I mentioned earlier that every group has one or more tech wizards; equally important are the costumers who prepare and repair throughout the rehearsal and performance cycle. They are wizards with sewing machines and needle and thread, and they rarely get the recognition they deserve.

In the New Perspectives Festival each director is on their own, which is just find with Dori, who's a stickler for costuming. For The King's English, Dori procured a costume for Thomas, the English Bobby, no doubt rented at her own expense, and found one of her daughter's dresses for tiny Lynne. I, on the other had, was on my own. Dori asked me if I had any loud, cheesy-looking aloha shirts. I allowed that I had a number of colorful yet tasteful shirts that might be suitable. As I went through them that evening, my wife suggested that any one of them would fit the bill, but Dori rejected several before I stumbled on one that actually has the Aloha Tower and Hawaiian surfers prominently featured on it. That shirt, baggy shorts, sandals with black socks, and a silly-looking hat make me look like, well, like the kind of guy you see wandering around on vacation in La Jolla.

We haven't gotten to costumes for Supression yet, but it should be easy: a grey pinstripe suit with a white shirt, conservative tie, and bowler hat will be perfect for me, and Melissa will be stunning in a nurse's outfit.

Publicity

New Perspective Festival PosterYou can start with the best written material, accumulate the finest cast, rehearse your heart out, and achieve a show and performances worthy of off-off-Broadway, but without an audience, what's the point? Even if personal performance improvement is your ultimate goal, the truth is that it's very Heisenberg -- the observation of the act changes the act, whether Act I or Act II. You need someone to watch in order to do your best. So, the challenge is to get folks to the venue to watch the show, something every theatre company since the Greeks have had to contend with. We have handbills surviving from Shakespeare's time; the publicity problem certainly predates the era of modern communications.

The five prongs of publicity for the New Perspective Festival are:

• handbills, postcards, and posters, just like in Shakespeare's time,
• newspaper publicity
• interviews
• Internet and viral marketing
• preview performance

The handbill/postcards were printed up by the hundreds and distributed to all participants, and with a cast and crew this big, if every person brings three or four friends we'll fill the house. It's up to each person to find appropriate spots to put the handbills or to give them to people who will actually keep them or hand them to yet others. It's easy to get folks to do this, as a good house is important to all. Large posters are also appearing in a number of locations, and as you can see from the flame motif, they are quite eye-catching.

Newspaper publicity is a bit trickier, and the Festival's association with Vantage Theatre has been helpful. Vantage knows the local print media points of contact and how to put press kits together. These get sent off to the Union Tribune, the Reader, and other publications, and many times they will use some or all of the proffered material. We'll see.

Interviews are always good, both audio and print, and with the availability of the Internet, they can survive their initial publication and continue to be available. Here's a 14 minute interview that's still available.

Internet and viral marketing is a new medium that will help bring in the new generation of folks who get event information from that medium, and viral marketing is, obviously, one of the reasons for this blog. While it can't take the place of traditional theatre publicity, it is an "edge-out" strategy that will bring new faces into the theatre.

Finally, we did a preview performance of The King's English at an event called Sight and Sound at the Bamboo Lounge in Hillcrest on May 29. A couple of pictures are on the web page, and you can see that the observers in the background were actually enjoying the show.