91����

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26-27 Mainstage Productions

Fall:

• The Late Wedding
• A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder
• Jazz Nutcracker

Spring:

• Small Mouth Sounds
• The Welkin

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Spring Mainstage Productions:

Small Mouth Sounds and The Welkin

Auditions

• Sunday, Oct. 25th, 4:00pm - 8:00pm
• Wednesday, Oct. 28th, 7:00pm - 11pm                                      

Location: Fine Arts, Studio B / FA 196

• Please prepare a memorized monologue of your choice, approximately 1 minute in length.

Choose material that you enjoy performing and that you feel shows us something about you as an actor. Contemporary or classical material is welcome.

If you do not have a memorized monologue prepared, please audition anyway! Material will be available at the audition for you to read. You do not need to prepare this material in advance.

We are interested in meeting you and seeing your imagination, presence, connection to language, sense of humor, and willingness to make bold, specific choices.

Callbacks

• Monday, Nov. 16th, Tuesday, Nov. 17th, and Thursday, Nov. 19th,  7:00pm - 11:00pm.

Location: Fine Arts, Studio A and Studio B   
 

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Small Mouth Sounds

• Written by Bess Wohl

• Director: Elizabeth Mozer

• February 25th - February 28th, 2027

Plot Synopsis: 

In the overwhelming quiet of the woods, six urbanites embark on a silent retreat. As these strangers confront internal demons both profound and absurd, their vows of silence collide with the achingly human need to connect. Both the humor and the pathos spring from mostly wordless interactions, a testimony to Wohl’s intrepid writing. Small Mouth Sounds is a model of ingenuity, a luminous and compassionate play where the ridiculousness rubs up against the sublime as the play's characters struggle to find answers to some of life's biggest questions.

Schedule:

• First Rehearsal - Tuesday, January 19th
• Tech Rehearsals - Friday, February 19th - Sunday, February 21st
• Dress Rehearsals - Monday, February 22nd - Wednesday, February 24th
• Performances:
  • Thursday, February 25th @ 8pm
  • Friday, February 26 @ 8pm
  • Saturday, February 27 @ 2pm & 8pm
  • Sunday, February 28 @ 2pm

Roles/Character Descriptions: 

• 3 female identifying actors: the roles of Joan, Judy, and Alicia
• 3 male identifying actors: the roles of Jan, Rodney, and Ned
• 1 male or female identifying actor: the role of Teacher (this character is off stage on a mic)

-- All actors may be of any race or ethnicity -- We encourage students of all races and experiences to audition! We want to create an inclusive, diverse cast!

From the Director:
In a world where so much of our time is spent on screens, ‘disembodied’, this play gives actors the opportunity to communicate narrative physically, non-verbally – and the audience is provided an intimate experience of this physical story-telling. Small Mouth Sounds is a fun, moving :), skill-building experience for theatre artists and a unique theatrical experience for all. Don’t get me wrong – there are words in the play – but the dialogue is minimal (except for the Teacher). Much of the narrative is shared through subtle and not so subtle actions, behaviors, body language, gestures, and small mouth sounds. As the old saying goes - actions speak louder than words.

to script

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The Welkin

• Written by Lucy Kirkwood
• Director: Lisa Rothe
• April 15th - April 19th, 2027

Plot Synopsis: 

England, 1759. A young woman has been sentenced to hang for murder, but her execution is delayed when she claims to be pregnant. Twelve local women are summoned to determine whether she is telling the truth.

Confined together as a storm gathers outside, the women bring their own histories, prejudices, secrets, and deeply held beliefs into the room. What begins as a seemingly straightforward question about one woman’s body becomes a fierce, funny, and increasingly complicated examination of truth, justice, power, and who gets to decide another person’s fate. The Welkin is a visceral, darkly comic play about women judging women, the danger of certainty, and the difficult act of truly seeing one another.

Schedule:

• Rehearsals:
  
  • First Rehearsal - Monday, February 22nd
  • Tech Rehearsals - Friday, April 9th - Sunday, April 11th
  • Dress Rehearsals - Monday, April 12th - Wednesday, April 14th
  • Performances:
    • Thursday, April 15th @ 8pm
    • Friday, April 16th @ 8pm
    • Saturday, April 17th @ 2pm
    • Sunday, April 18th @ 7pm
    • Monday, April 19th @ 8pm

Roles/Character Descriptions:

The Welkin centers a jury of twelve women who are called together to determine whether Sally Poppy, a young woman sentenced to death, is pregnant.

Although gender is central to the dramatic circumstances of The Welkin, we are interested in an expansive understanding of who can embody these characters. The twelve jurors and Sally are written as women and should be embodied by performers who can authentically inhabit the lived social and bodily circumstances the play assigns to women. This may include cisgender women, transgender women, and nonbinary or gender-expansive performers for whom these roles resonate.

The male characters are written as men, but we do not believe the gender identity of the performer necessarily needs to correspond to the gender of the character.

No character is written as requiring a specific race or ethnicity. We welcome performers of all racial and ethnic identities and are interested in building an intentionally multiracial ensemble rather than treating whiteness as the default because the play is set in 18th-century rural England.

Above all, we are seeking an ensemble with extraordinary range, humor, muscularity, emotional availability, and a capacity to create twelve profoundly distinct human beings. The differences among these women — age, class, experience, belief, sexuality, motherhood, relationship to their bodies, and relationship to power — are essential to the world of the play.

Altogether, we are looking for 16 actors.

THE ACCUSED:

SALLY POPPY — Early 20s. A young woman convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. Defiant, ferocious, funny, unpredictable, intelligent, and almost impossible to sentimentalize. Sally has survived a brutal world and refuses to behave in ways that might make that world more sympathetic toward her. She is simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous, victim and provocateur. Requires an actor with tremendous presence, emotional fearlessness, humor, and complexity.

THE JURY OF MATRONS:

ELIZABETH “LIZZY” LUKE — Mid-30s. The local midwife. Intelligent, practical, independent, skeptical, compassionate, and unafraid of difficult truths. Elizabeth understands women’s bodies better than anyone else in the room and therefore understands how impossible the jury’s task actually is. She becomes the strongest advocate for uncertainty, evidence, and Sally’s humanity. A woman accustomed to carrying responsibility, including its failures and griefs. Requires substantial emotional and intellectual range.

CHARLOTTE CARY — Older. The fore-matron of the jury and an outsider to the community, visiting from Colchester. The widow of a colonel, Charlotte carries class privilege, social authority, certainty, and a formidable sense of propriety into the room. She is articulate, commanding, judgmental, and deeply invested in order. Her certainty makes her a powerful counterforce to Elizabeth. Requires authority, precision, formidable presence, and an ability to find the humanity beneath rigidity.

JUDITH BREWER — Older. Earthy, frank, observant, irreverent, and wonderfully alive. Judith is navigating menopause and speaks about the body, desire, aging, and discomfort with an openness that cuts through the room’s propriety. She has a longstanding familiarity with Elizabeth and possesses both humor and hard-earned wisdom. Requires excellent comic instincts alongside emotional depth and groundedness.

SARAH SMITH — Older. A formidable survivor who has lived a great deal of life: three husbands and twenty-one children. Practical, direct, unsentimental, physically capable, and full of stories. She carries the authority of lived experience rather than social status. Funny without trying to be funny, and deeply rooted in the history and folklore of the community. Requires warmth, wit, toughness, and a strong individual presence.

HELEN LUDLOW — Middle-aged. Gentle, thoughtful, compassionate, and more perceptive than she initially appears. After twelve miscarriages and a stillborn son, Helen carries profound experience of pregnancy and loss. She also knows something of Sally’s childhood and enters the jury with a capacity to imagine that the story everyone believes may not be the whole story. Requires great emotional delicacy, warmth, intelligence, and quiet strength.

SARAH HOLLIS — Middle-aged, somewhat older than Elizabeth. Sarah has not spoken for approximately twenty years, since the birth of her son, but she is emphatically not absent from the room. Warm, expressive, attentive, and deeply connected to the other women, she communicates physically and becomes capable of extraordinary intimacy and tenderness without language. A wonderful role for an actor with exceptional physical expressiveness, specificity, humor, and listening.

EMMA JENKINS — Middle-aged. A shopkeeper’s wife who has served on juries of matrons before and therefore considers herself something of an authority on the process. Proper, opinionated, practical, status-conscious, fastidious, and often very funny. Emma likes rules, cleanliness, certainty, and knowing how things are supposed to work. Beneath that certainty is a woman trying to maintain order in a world that continually refuses to remain orderly. Requires sharp comic timing and strong character instincts.

KITTY GIVENS — Young. Scottish, originally from Oban. Bold, irreverent, quick, funny, earthy, and imaginative. Kitty has had six children, four of whom survived, and possesses the resilience of someone for whom life and death have always existed close together. She and Hannah form a wonderfully comic partnership, but Kitty’s humor should never obscure her intelligence or capacity for feeling. Requires tremendous comic facility, spontaneity, and emotional availability. Scottish dialect required or must be learned.

HANNAH RUSTED — Young. A working-class mother of three whose family is under increasing economic pressure. Funny, imaginative, blunt, and restless. She and Kitty operate almost like a comic double act, finishing and building upon one another’s thoughts, but beneath Hannah’s humor is a woman acutely aware of how precarious her life is. Requires excellent comic rhythm, playfulness, and the ability to reveal the anxiety beneath the comedy.

MARY MIDDLETON — Young, approximately 25, and pregnant. Mother of five, currently expecting another child. Open-hearted, credulous, distractible, and wonderfully idiosyncratic. Mary can seem confused or easily led, but the play insists that her perspective matters as much as anyone else’s. Her body also gives her immediate authority within a jury assembled specifically around the mysteries of pregnancy. Requires a fearless comic actor who never condescends to the character and can find Mary's genuine emotional life.

ANN LAVENDER — Young. Mother of four daughters and married to an aspiring poet whose ideals about sharing domestic labor have not entirely translated into practice. Sensitive, anxious, romantic, curious, and susceptible to the frightening possibilities of the world around her. Ann brings a slightly more refined sensibility to the group while still carrying the exhaustion and practical realities of motherhood. Requires strong comic instincts and emotional responsiveness.

PEG CARTER — Young and pregnant with her first child. Her husband is gardener to the wealthy Wax family, tying Peg economically and socially to the family of the murdered girl. Proud of her marriage and deeply conscious of respectability, Peg initially views Sally through the lens of class, morality, and contamination. Her pregnancy makes the jury’s central question intensely personal, and over the course of the play her own body becomes part of the room’s unfolding drama. Requires warmth, vulnerability, humor, and the ability to negotiate significant physical and emotional stakes.

OTHER CHARACTERS:

MR. COOMBES — The court bailiff charged with overseeing the jury. Male character. Familiar with the women and particularly with Elizabeth. He represents the authority of the court while possessing considerably less authority over the room than he would like. LADY WAX — Alice’s grieving mother and a member of the wealthy Wax family. A woman of considerable social status whose grief brings the human cost of Alice’s death directly into the room.

*FREDERICK POPPY/THE JUSTICE/DR WILLIS – played by same actor:

*FREDERICK POPPY — Sally’s husband. Male character. A working-class man whose attempts to assert marital authority over Sally reveal both the violence embedded in their world and his own vulnerability. His relationship to Sally is more complicated than it first appears.

*THE JUSTICE — The magistrate presiding over Sally’s case and the empanelling of the jury. An embodiment of the legal authority and social order governing the women’s lives.

*DOCTOR WILLIS — Male character. A physician brought in to determine whether Sally is pregnant. Courteous and confident in his medical authority, he represents a male medical establishment beginning to supersede the embodied knowledge of women and midwives.

**KATY LUKE/ALICE WAX – played by the same actor:

**KATY LUKE — Elizabeth’s daughter. 12 years old. Young, curious, and fascinated by the approaching comet, with an imagination directed toward the sky and the future.

**ALICE WAX — The young woman whose murder has brought Sally to trial. 13 years old. Though her death drives the action of the play, Alice appears within the play’s larger theatrical and imaginative world rather than as part of the jury-room action. 

to script

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Further Information on Auditions

It is the auditioner’s responsibility to become acquainted with the roles, the nature of the production, and the scope of commitment prior to casting. It is strongly recommended that auditioners read scripts and production materials before the first audition. Links to the script will be posted above. 

Who can audition for a theatre production? EVERYONE!

Any and all registered 91���� students are welcome to audition for all Theatre Department Productions. We do NOT require that an auditioner is a Theatre Major or Minor. We hold open auditions for our MainStage and Studio Shows. Always arrive a few minutes early to fill out paperwork/discuss logistics ahead of time. See below for our casting policy.

Here's some tips for auditioning from our directors:

• Choose a song that you feel passionate about. Something that makes you say to yourself "I have to do this!" Practice, practice, practice.
• Ask friends and family to listen to you do your material. Listen to feedback but only use that which you feel certain in your heart you can apply to your work.
• Sing while you do the dishes, while you drive, while you do the laundry, when you take a walk. Sing your song hundreds of times.
• Know, deep within you that the people who are auditioning you want you to be great. They are not looking for your problems but rather your promise!

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Casting Policy for 91���� Students:

Eligibility:

Any person is eligible for auditioning and casting who will be registered for four or more semester hours of credit in any course taught in the University, other than the production itself, during the semester in which the production for which the auditions are being held is performed. Simply stated, one must be a registered student during the semester of performance. However, under certain conditions, Theatre faculty members or persons designated as "Artists in Residence" may be cast.

Note: All students are expected to familiarize themselves with and to take full advantage of the actor training sequence of classes offered by the department so that their acquired skills and abilities will make them more competitive and more readily recognizable to the faculty.

Representation, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in casting and production: 

The educational mission of the 91���� Theatre Department is to provide equal opportunities and apprenticeship experiences to students without discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, religion, disability, nationality, gender identity, or sexual orientation. We believe that theatre is stronger when our season selection, casting process, and production needs are filled inclusively. Inclusivity will take many forms, including the variety of stories we choose to tell, assembling diverse artistic teams, making production assignments available to as many students as possible and engaging in color conscious casting.

Color-conscious casting “intentionally considers the race and ethnicity of actors and the characters they play in order to oppose racism, honor and respect cultures, foster stronger productions, and contribute to a more equitable world. Without it, we risk perpetuating a system that privileges whiteness with greater access and opportunity, and appropriates the cultures of communities of color.” (American Theatre) Likewise, we practice an attitude of respect, and opposition to bias and discrimination regarding gender and gender identity, including (but not limited to) trans and gender queer identities. 

Where a playwright’s intention calls for casting actors of a particular race, ethnicity, and/or gender, the director and/or casting agent must do all within their power to adhere to the playwright’s intention. If an actor of the appropriate race, ethnicity, or gender is not found, the director will initiate a conversation with the department to discuss what the next appropriate steps would entail. Steps may include, but are not limited to, seeking permission from the copyright holder for alternative casting permission, or canceling the production. At the same time, we encourage an experimental learning environment in which all directors stretch beyond historical expectations, casting traditions, or commercial conceptions of “type,” especially in cases where race, gender, ethnicity, or identity may not appear to be a major thematic element of the production.