FIRST READ

Last night the cast of Murdering Marlowe read the play.

There is something so exciting about a first reading. Watching and listening to the actors work the language and get their heads around the ideas and expressions.

In this case, it's more thrilling than usual since the play is written in a pseudo-Elizabethan style with verse and prose. There is nothing more engaging than the sound of different words working together to form the music that is the play. And in this play the ideas are quite contemporary: envy, power, religion, fame and sex.

It should be a thrilling ride, but more on that later.

HERE WE GO

After a week to scramble, a cast has been assembled for Murdering Marlowe.

We had auditions then conducted some callbacks (rare for me) and were finally able to put together a group of talented people.

Tonight we'll meet to read the play and go over introductions. This will give us roughly 9 weeks to get this play in shape. That should be enough and with the commitment of everyone involved, this should be another exciting show.

Currently, I've been tossing around the idea of staging this play with a film-noir/neo-noir style. Charles Marowitz, the playwright, says the play is above all a thriller rather than a period drama. I would agree. He actually has a wonderful mock interview with Will Shakespeare that sheds some light on moving classical plays to different time periods.

CM: Does it bother you to have your plays radically reinterpreted, their time periods changed, the characters costumed in attire ranging from the Stone Age to the 21st century?

WS: Why should it? I did the same in my own time. We played in "modern dress," you know -- or what was modern in the l6th and l7th centuries. It doesn't matter to me what the clothes look like, or the settings. What does bother me is when these wiseacres impose a new story on to mine which disintegrates the original and makes a mush of both. It's like a bad organ transplant; the original organism rejects the new heart or liver and the fusion only draws attention to the incompatibility of both. Now that really does get my goat!

CW: So you don't mind being freely "reinterpreted"?

WS: Being reinterpreted is the only way my work can possibly survive. It almost perished in the Victorian era because a few fussbudgets were determined to protect and defend me against distortion -- but what they called "distortion" was really the Present interacting with the Past, which is the bounden duty of the Present to do. God forfend that I should fall into the hands of the Purists, the Scholars, and the Academics! They're the New Puritans and we have to fight them as staunchly today as I did five centuries ago.

Interesting stuff. And I couldn't agree more. The plays won't survive if we don't constantly play with them in order to discover what lies beneath the text. Or what new worlds are waiting for us to wake up.

A WEEK TO SCRAMBLE

It has been a week to scramble.

After holding auditions last Sunday night for Murdering Marlowe, we went to work on making choices on how to cast the show. That is why I've been away this week.

You can go back and forth on what to do about casting a show. We had some fine talent show up and I would say all went well, except for the fact that we didn't have enough men to cover the parts for the play. Damn. Damn. Damn.

So the week was spent making emails and phone calls, trying to find people to fill out the show. I think I hit 1 for 8 from the field. Not my best week in office. The problem is that we're pretty shrewd about casting. This isn't the little league baseball team where everyone gets to play regardless of talent. If you don't fit the part or the play, and I can't wedge you in somehow, we don't do it. That's it.

That's not arrogance. It's a responsibility to the audience that sees the work. It's also a responsibility to the playwright who wrote the piece.

I've had to reschedule a few shows due to that situation. This is because I believe it's important to have the best people you can find on stage. Especially for a show that will be getting a Chicago premiere. That might sound tough but you have to have some guiding principles or standards.

Still, I was encouraged by the auditions, which featured some wonderful women and some energizing men.

Now the trick is finding a way to cast the play, or move on to a new production. I have a few days. The clock is ticking.

ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO

We finished Life X 3 last night.

Endings are always difficult with theater. You work 6,8 or maybe 9 weeks with a cast, put up the show, ride the emotional roller coaster of audiences, reviews and wondering whether the heat will be on - then it's over. Just like that, it all seems to stop at once.

Usually you have a certain amount of downtime to reload and think of the future. In this case, we had scheduled auditions for Murdering Marlowe roughly two hours after Life ended. Luckily our strike only took 10 minutes (one of the perks with doing a Janus show).

The show stayed strong throughout the run, and the cast kept their focus, even with light audiences, fluctuating temperatures and hot and spicy cheez-its.

I felt fortunate to direct this group. They worked well with each other - onstage and off - which can be rare in theater; where moods change like the wind and people can get very strange very quickly. But this group did us proud for our first effort at the Elgin Art Showcase.

Now the challenge becomes growing our audience. It feels like we're starting from scratch.

Fortunately, we have two more "practice" productions to see how what we'll work best for us.

Yes, we're scheduled beyond the next two shows, but they are part of our "breaking-in" phase to see what works well in the space. So far so good, save for the fact that we need to find the secret to getting the ever illusive larger audience.

As the late (I'll call him great) theater producer Fred Solari (Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago) said to me a few years ago: "When you find out the secret, be sure to let me know."

I THINK WE CAN, I THINK WE CAN

Previous posts found me lamenting the lack of male actors in the suburbs. This post still has me pouting, but there is hope, as the numbers have changed.

At last count, we have six men lined up to audition for the pseudo-Elizabethan thriller Murdering Marlowe by Charles Marowitz. We also have 10 women auditioning for only two parts, which is very typical and unfortunate.

Perhaps we should do something with a dominant female cast. That would makes sense. Maybe The Trojan Women as suggested by Terry Domschke (Artistic Director) or a gender-bending take on a classical play with the author long dead (as suggested by Tara Schuman - Stage Manager). Perhaps the low turnout is due to the foreign title. This is, after all, a newer play, which will be the Chicago-area premiere.

This is a discussion me and my fellow Janus folks had last night.

Would a better-known play attract more people to audition as well as an audience to support them? The obvious answer is yes.

So why would we decide to do two new plays to christen our new space? It appears better to play it safe, right? Of course it does.

The problem is that I (Sean, the director of these two plays) have been seduced by their wonderful theatrical qualities.

These are great plays for actors with meaty roles, thrilling language and interesting stories. Oh, yes, the audience will find them exciting as well.

This is little consolation when your current show struggles to find an audience and your next show cannot easily be cast.

Still, I have hope that these next two days will present us with more actors to audition and a strong weekend closing of Life X 3. At least that's my hope. I thing we can, I think we can, I think.