Sunday, January 23, 2011

New Project!!

On Friday I had an audition at The Next Stage, a small theater in North Hollywood. The director asked us to do an exercise, in lieu of a line reading or a monologue. We got on stage, three at a time, and when he put the music and blue light on, we had to approach these boxes, as though something was attracting us to them, something we made up in our heads, something evil. Then, when he shifted the lights to red, we were to become possessed by whatever was in the box. I chose Pride, and when the lights changed, I started crawling slowly up onto the box, saying stuff like "I can do 800 jumping jacks," and "I won an award for my cake at the bake sale," in a creepy sort of voice, just listing accomplishments as though I was desperate for approval. It was a strange little exercise, but I guess the point was to have us make a deliberate choice and see how we moved and presented ourselves on stage, which I've never really had a problem with. I sweated a couple days, but last night the director called me to offer a part!

The project is called The Seven Deadly Sins, written by the director I believe, and it's basically a series of vignettes around the theme. A lot of theaters in the area seem to be doing similar pieces, as I've seen audition notices at other places. But the company seems really cool. The theater space is small but I think I'll have a lot of fun with it. The schedule is actually gonna be really convenient since rehearsals are in the afternoons rather than evenings, and performances are only Thursday nights. Rehearsals are Monday through Friday, but only for three to four weeks, so really it's not that major of a commitment, which means it won't interfere with work too much and I can still look at other projects. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that Banana makes me close most days, I could probably do a whole other play on top of this one!

Anyway, I'm super excited just to be working on something creative, and I'm really interested in seeing how it turns out!