We've had plenty of unofficial meetings for Starling, considering that Confrontational has been committed to doing the play since March of last year. But last week marked our first official pre-production meeting, and the week we posted our audition notice and so things are really real now.
Accordingly, this morning was the first time I started doing math on rehearsals: Auditions are the beginning of March, if callbacks are the week after, then we won't have a cast until almost halfway through the month, and then we'll have to run all the logistics of getting five different actors (plus staff) to rehearsals, location, time, etc, and then I have to remind myself that we still have more than three months and this is no time to panic.
Posting auditions is one of my favorite parts of the process of mounting a show, just because there's a huge satisfaction in finding an inbox full of people who are interested in auditioning. Among those are people who specifically like the subject matter, or a play we've done before, or even (for this show, anyway) actors who are still in high school and looking for people to take them seriously. It's very gratifying.
Our meeting started with one of our playwrights and I sitting down with Ahren Buhmann. We're thrilled to be working with him again (Ahren designed the set and consulted on lighting for Proof). He's the production designer for Balagan and does a number of iconic, awesome sets every year. That means he also has a lot of materials to draw on from previous shows, and it turns out that he has lots of stuff already that will help us build a Warsaw cellar. Ahren did Proof as a favor, coming in and building the set literally overnight, and this time things are much more official in that we have a budget and more space and specific needs, and we're really excited to see what he does.
We're doing Starling at theLab@INScape, which we're also thrilled about. They've only been in the space a year, but their first show started with them shipping in dirt and building hills, so they like different, they like interactive, and they like ambitious, which is rad. They recently had a write-up in Seattle Weekly by John Longenbaugh, and if you want to hear more about what they're up to, including what their next show is, you should definitely read the article. We love John, as well, he's a remarkable writer and director who has had some wonderful success in the last year with the publication of both Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol and his anthology show Arcana.
We're still casting about for some other technical folks, but things are starting to fall into place, and we'll let you know about the other awesome people we get lined up in future blog entries.