Good things happen when actors start plotting

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Good things happen when actors start plotting

In the typical "theater company creation myth," a bunch of eager and naive friends from college are sitting around in the bar after one particularly thrilling show and they decide -- because they're just ignorant enough to make it work -- that what the world really needs is their new theater company.

Rarely do you hear the same story from a bunch of seasoned actors like the ubiquitous Steve Hendrickson and Stacia Rice yet, at least as far as the sitting-around-a-bar part, that appears to be how "The Seagull Project" came to be.

This Monday, April 13, you can hang out over at the Jungle Theater from 7:30-10:00 and, for free, watch a bunch of really good local actors (Steve, Stacia, Emily Gunyou Halaas, John MIddleton, Zach Curtis, Raye Birk, Nat and Cathy Fuller, Barbara Kingsley, and more) take a crack at reading Anton Chekhov's The Seagull for your amusement.

I love this type of grassrootsy, no-good-reason-except-art-is-fun kind of effort, so I felt compelled to find out whether they were concocting some master plan. Like maybe it's a tryout for someone - the way they audition Broadway musicals for backers? Here was Steve Hendrickson's response:

Just a few bored actors in a bar talking about things they'd like to do but probably wouldn't get a chance to. I said I'd like to do Chekhov: Vanya, Astrov, Trigorin, etc. and Cathy Fuller said she'd always wanted to play Arkadina. So we thought about Seagull. Stacia Rice said she didn't like the play but everyone said she should play Masha, so we talked her onboard, and the next thing we knew we were emailing other people and had a cast, and Joel Sass said we could use the Jungle, so here we go.

Sometimes I daydream that we might interest a theatre in doing an actual production but in reality it's just too big a cast for anybody but the Guthrie to do and pay people a decent salary. So it's just sort of having an actor's workout. Hopefully we'll get some kind of an audience, have some wine and not bore everybody to death. If it goes well we might try to start doing some kind of series — maybe 3-4 times a year, but we'll have to see how it goes.

Go check it out. You don't often get to see this type of large, talented, and experienced cast do a reading of a classic play simply "for the love of the game."

—Posted at 10:27 pm by Alan