2012 Season Auditions

Friday, February 3rd from 4-7 PM (6-7 PM AEA/EMC)
Saturday, February 4th from 1-6 PM (1-2 PM AEA/EMC)

Please Prepare: a 1-1.5 minute Shakespearean monologue.

The Shakespeare Festival’s 19th mainstage season will feature Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a coproduction with Red Noses Theater Company.  Both plays will be performed by a A SINGLE CAST. All roles are open with the exceptions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet will then be remounted in January 2013 as the annual Production for the Schools. We will be inquiring about your availability for that production.

Rehearsals begin May 15th, with Hamlet opening on June 14th and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern opening on June 21st. These two mainstage productions close on July 8th, with the option of a one-week extension.

As you consider these auditions, please be aware that the schedule for this project will differ from previous Festival seasons.  Both shows will be performed by a single cast, making tandem rehearsals essential.  Weekday rehearsals will take place during late afternoon and evening hours, with daytime and evening rehearsals possible on the weekends.  Each show will run for 9 performances in a partial repertory schedule. These time constraints will not allow us to accomodate any but the most urgent and brief conflicts.  We understand that many actors are involved in multiple theatre/film projects, including film auditions.  We respectfully ask that you NOT audition unless you can commit completely to the entire schedule.

To schedule your audition, please contact Ashley at
865-5106 or arobison@tulane.edu
Auditions will be schedule in half hour increments.

For those who wish to audition from Out of State:

At this time, SFT cannot provide funding for travel or housing.  Please keep this in mind as you plan your auditions.

To submit video auditions, please email them to:

Ashley Robison
c/o The Shakespeare Festival at Tulane
Tulane University Department of Theatre & Dance
215 McWilliams Hall
New Orleans, LA 70118

SFT is pleased to have have finished the 2012 Performances for the Schools production of Julius Caesar.  While Caesar is not often considered the Bard’s sexiest work, we were thrilled to have so many students interacting with the show each day– through hoots and hollars, cries and gasps, and the occasional swoon.  This year almost 5500 students attended the performance of Julius Caesar, and we were so lucky to have Paula Burch-Celentano capture pictures from this extraordinary event.

See more pictures from the Tulane New Wave here.

Tulane continues to make improvements to the Newcomb Circle area.  The parking between the LBC, Dixon Hall, and the Library will be under construction this summer.

We advise all patrons to arrive early to ensure they find ample parking. Parking continues to be free and open at the Diboll Parking Garage, in Newcomb Circle, as well on Broadway.

To enter Newcomb Circle please: turn on to Willow from Broadway and take the first RIGHT on to Audobon Place.  This will lead you in to Newcomb Circle.

From the staff at The New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane, we would like to first wish you all a great and happy holiday season.  I hope your Thanksgiving was lovely and you enjoyed a restful weekend.

We would like to thank you all for your interest in the 2011 Festival, and thank you for taking time out to audition with us (whether in person or via video).  I wanted to touch base with you all and let you know a timeline of where we are at.

• Our Julius Caesar director, Amy Holtcamp, has received her copies of the video auditions and is reviewing them as we speak.
• If you were an SFT company member from a previous season, please do not worry that you weren’t at the main auditions– we will be in touch with each of you regarding call backs.
• We are scheduling callbacks for early February, and will be in touch with those individuals that Amy and Shad would like to see again.  If you are not called back, please do not be concerned– callbacks do not indicate one way or the other whether you will or will not be cast. It is my hope that we will be in touch with everyone within the first two weeks of January.

Our Performance for the Schools production of Macbeth opens on January 12th and runs through January 21st.  We will have an evening, public performance on January 14th at 8 p.m., which we invite you all to join us for.  If you’d like to attend, please contact me about 1/2 priced tickets.

As always, if you have questions, changes in schedules or new conflicts, please feel free to get in touch with me.  You can call the Box Office from 10-4 (504) 865-5106, or reach me at my personal email account, arobison@tulane.edu.

Happy Holidays!

As I was welcoming audience members into Macbeth, a regular patron took the time to congratulate Ron and myself on the quality of the last few years, but also ask me the magic question: why set the productions in New Orleans? It was a genuinely curious inquiry rather than a set up for their explaining why we should not, so I answered simply and honestly: It is about access. It is how I let my audiences, all my audiences, into Shakespeare. In other words, to paraphrase Orson Welles—who figures predominantly in this entry, Shakespeare belongs to everyone, and the more people I can reach with his language, the better future I have for my festival. Until I start radically deconstructing his texts, the people who love Shakespeare are going to come… if simply to tell me why I am doing it wrong. It is everyone else I am worried about: those patrons my friend Gavin would have called human beings. I hope the people I know like it, but I pray the people I do not know love it. That is how you build an audience.

One of the biggest mistakes in staging Shakespeare comes from the inability to distinguish performing for modern sensibilities as opposed to performing with modern sensibilities. The first is a necessity; the second is a choice. Performing for modern sensibilities means you search for ways to communicate the meaning of the text in the clearest possible manner, nothing more. Performing for means you take your audience into consideration not by dumbing down the material but by ensuring the essential story is clear through program notes and excising anachronistic language. Performing with modern sensibilities is more akin to the more popularly known concept production.

Two celebrated productions from the 1930’s provide clear examples of the difference. Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic’s Romeo and Juliet of 1934 falls into the first category whereas Orson Welles’, told you he would come back, 1937 Julius Caesar is a strong example of the second. Both of these productions granted their audiences access into their words of the Bard, but while the first used expectations to heighten the joy and understanding of the text, the second shattered those expectations to restore the play’s visceral thrill. Using a New Stagecraft set designed by Jo Mielziner, the McClintic production told the tale of the doomed lovers through judicious adherence to the text, taking audience attention spans and knowledge into account, and a healthy respect for audience expectations of Shakespeare. From all accounts, Romeo and Juliet was a celebration of language and old time stage acting. Designed like Giotti’s paintings of Assisi, McClintic’s production guided Cornell’s Juliet through a world of sunlight, sword fights and romance:

It was a performance at once resonant and vibrant; neither modern not archaic; but infinitely human; a performance which neither glorified the star, the actors, nor the director, but all three together and therefore the play (Commonweal, December 21^st, 1934).

It sounds just like you want Romeo and Juliet to be, does it not? A wondrous fulfillment of expectation. Clear language and romantic nostalgia for a Shakespearean world that actually never existed. It seems to have delivered what the audience expected without delivering a museum piece: like Zeffirelli, Shakespeare in Love, and Slings and Arrows’ Romeo and Juliet rolled into one.

On the other hand, Welles’ thunderclap of Caesar was set in a modern fascist state of platforms, blood red brick walls, Nuremberg lighting, and lasted only an hour and twenty minutes. Along with Jean Rosenthal’s cathedral of ice lighting, the production is most famous for its harrowing use of the mob. Under the twenty-two year old Welles’ direction, the mob became a vicious organism of destruction and irrational behavior. No moment was remembered more frighteningly than the Cinna the Poet sequence. The scene is simple. A poet named Cinna is returning from Caesar’s funeral, he is met by a mob that mistake him for Cinna the Conspirator. Even though he manages to convince a few he is not one of Caesars assassins, it makes no difference, and they kill him for his bad verses:

The rage of a roused mob, their destruction of an innocent, rather foolish creature, someone immediately recognizable from real life, gave the whole production its authenticity: ‘it’s great success was as a political drama written the night before,’ [Norman] Lloyd said, ‘It was Costa-Garvas.’

What the audience was seeing had metaphorically happened the night before. It was 1937 and darkness was falling all over Europe when Welles’ Shakespeare hit Broadway. For those not from Germanic stock, Central Europe had become a truly treacherous place. Even the implication that one was other, Jew, Gypsy, or Homosexual, was enough to turn average citizens into a bloodthirsty mob. So, it was Welles’ Cinna.

Relevance and accessibility are the keys. A Shakespearean concept production must speak to its community by answering the question why is this production relevant to my life. How it answers that question is the concept, and the accessibility of that concept determines that concept’s success. In our 2009 production of King Lear, I began I was continually drawn to Lear’s lament in the shelter from the storm:

Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,|
And show the heavens more just.

For a city less than five years removed from the economic and spiritual destruction of Katrina, the quote hit home. Lear has waited too long to help the poor and the wretched. Now the storm comes and there is no one to help those in need, a storm whose force is so great as to expose not only the weak in a community but also the weakness of a community. To emphasize this passage in production, to make it clear that bad leadership leaves a country open to disaster from a natural force, is to perform for the modern sensibilities of a community. However, to set the production in New Orleans in the late 1950’s during an approaching hurricane is to engage with modern sensibilities. I believe this approach to be relevant to the audience. If I am correct, then that relevance grants the audience access.

I hope it is now apparent that a production can be both for and with, and it can dilate points of emphasis per the director’s choosing. Good productions often walk a fine line between the two conditions. But if there is a clean rule in regards to those two approaches, it is this: achieving the second must never come at expense of the first. If it does, what is produced might be entertaining and quite possibly insightful, but it will not be Shakespeare. In fact, let’s double down by saying the second approach must always be in service to the first: does the with illuminate the original meaning? In the case of Welles’ production, based on the view of scholars such as Oliver Arnold who see a great deal of fear of the mob in Shakespeare’s Roman plays, the view of the Roman plebs alone seems to serve original intent. The challenge that Welles’ Caesar successfully accomplished is the one our festival must continually navigate with our New Orleans’ themed productions. We must make our shows relevant and accessible to our audiences without removing Shakespeare from Shakespeare.

A rehearsal of Orson Welles rehearsing Julius Caesar.

The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theatre is born. The theatre, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit. (Antonin Artaud)

Being stuck in an airport for a connecting flight puts a person twixt and ‘tween, an actual manifestation of Victor Turner’s liminal state: you are both in the process of becoming while unable to move in either direction from your immediate condition. It gives you the opportunity to contemplate where you were and where you are going.

It is where I found myself last Thursday night and Friday morning: stuck in the Miami airport terminal unable to return to New Orleans but delayed from reaching my brother’s wedding in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Making matters worse, I left behind a Shakespeare Festival that was opening its second offering of the season, The Everlasting Bonfire, on the first weekend of our great experiment of running two shows simultaneously. And while everyone insisted a brother’s wedding is an acceptable excuse, the workaholic is convinced he is abandoning his job as newly minted artistic director in the midst of its greatest need. So, I sat on Thursday night, awaiting a host of phone calls and texts from box office staff, stage manager and actors on the condition of shows I could not control even if I were present. If not the Miami terminal, I would merely be pacing a lobby, one of the other great liminal spaces, contemplating where I was and where I was going.

Instead, I got the almost unbearable image of Brown Pelicans soaked in black toxins and the horrifying sight of a perpetual undersea plume; both giving lie to the term oil shortage. All of it was narrated by Anderson Cooper’s outrage at the lack of transparency of either the federal government or our friends at BP. These were my choices for evening: I could either contemplate my own absence from authority at Shakespeare, or I could witness on television an absence of authority in my country. It seemed no matter where I sat, I was powerlessly in between.

But with powerlessness comes perspective. Waiting for personal news and watching public events, I kept thinking about all the theatrical and perfomative artists who were attempting to call attention to or articulate what happened/is happening in The Gulf. Through fliers on bulletin boards or proclamation on facebook, artists across our city have announced their anger or indicated their distress, and they have promised hair, money, or attention for the plight of The Gulf South Eco-Community. With motives that range from a simple desire for publicity to genuine concern, these artists, I fear, all seem to be engaged in Peter Brook’s axiom that most artists are signaling across great distances to confirm their existence for not only others but themselves.

After all, nothing blinds the world to the artist than the immediate flash of an actual disaster. Collapsing towers, shock-and-awe, evaporating infrastructures, and erupting pipes embody the word tragedy more than any bloody mask could hope. Moreover, bungled responses, pointing fingers, hurled shoes, guys named Brownie, and Kentucky doctors defending the rights of foreign corporations are capable of producing far greater laughs than even the best timed pratfalls. Reversals, catharsis, and purgation with all the staggering immediacy of a sonic boom? Such events will drain the audience for theatre in the blink of an eye, and they will force you to mix metaphors just as I have done in the first half of this compound sentence.

While its operation occurs in the ephemeral present, theatre deals almost exclusively with prescience and aftermath. Great works of theatrical art either saw it coming or made sense of what happened after. Any attempt to capture a moment immediately only appears opportunistic careerism or a hopelessly naïve attempt to give coherence to raw emotion. Good luck with your mood poem; theatre will have none of it. One need only read the fraudulent articulate lamentation of Titus Andronicus to his son in the wake of Lavinia’s defilement and then compare it to the dark sublimity of Lear confronted with Edgar’s promised end to see that the trifecta of howl! howl! howl! is the only realistic response to the image of horror. Such nightmares cut to the brain.

The Greeks understood this and left their horror in the wings. For them, it was the moment before and the moment after that really matter: theatre as a gigantic anticipation/recollection machine. From Beaumarchais’ Figaro to Vaclav Havel’s protestations to Artaud’s immunized dregs, theatre has served to live on the edge of the events of crisis. It can be a model for what Napoleon saw as the revolution in action, but it is not the revolution itself. Bathtubs might fill with blood, queens might hang themselves with bed sheets, and kings might gouge out their eyes, but no one who wrote those alluded-to-works arrogantly presumed they were capable of presenting such atrocity in its actual ferocity. Provocation and summation are the charge, so playing make believe when the bullets are actually flying is more than a thankless task… it is either fruitless of deadly. Theatre thrives when something is about to happen.

But something has happened, and we all sit as powerless in waiting rooms across the country in the face of the flow. James Cameron’s and Kevin Costner’s return from The Abyss of Waterworld notwithstanding, those of us who call entertainment our industry find ourselves unable to articulate the immediacy of the rage to keep pace with the gusher beneath The Gulf. Any immediate response is bound not to measure up, so either we will have to wait for five years for the proper perspective or search the recent past for a theatrical offering capable of explaining the unfathomable.

I kept searching underneath for any recent theatrical offerings that gave voice to our helpless rage. The image I kept returning to was the chalk white face and pitch black feet of Nick Slie’s transformative performance in Artspot Production’s Loup Garou. It is rare that a designer, director and actor create a unified front in our town, so on those rare occasions of occurrence when it does happen, it needs to be celebrated. What Slie achieved with director Kathy Randel’s and designer Jeff Becker was a synthesis of intent. Using an open field in City Park’s storm damaged golf course, the three artists take a murky mood poem by Raymond “Moose” Jackson about an Acadiana Werewolf and create a man/monster intrinsically tied to his environment. A romantic collision of history, myth, and environmental outrage, the actual text is a alternately stirring and infuriating while bordering on incoherence, but its dramaturgical shortcoming are overwhelmed by raw emotional wordplay and the work of the three aforementioned collaborators. Randel’s guides her lead through a maze of words and set: Slie’s wolf goes under the earth for lost loves, into trees searching for monsters, and rises above it all on metal/wood swing sets that summon the flame of inspiration and industry. All of it never losing sight that the destination must be the transformation of man into wolf. Slie’s performance is marked by a strenuous effort that often dooms lesser performers, and threatens to unravel his own, but his own soulful eyes give an ease and sense of wonder that permeates his own violent gyrations from degenerating into an actor-on-a-tour-de-force-binge that too often marks one person shows in this town.

But it was the thought of that intrinsic connection to the environment that kept returning me to Slie’s performance as I sat in that airport. An actor covered in the remains of monsters juxtaposed against our state bird covered in the remains of monsters? Staggering. Tragically, it is even more powerful since the image of the actor came first. The thoughts begin to bubble up: A Canadian Diaspora blends with German immigrants to become trappers to become fishermen to become wolves to become rig workers. Mix in the toxicology intensity of Catholicism, hot sauce and alcohol, and it blends all the elements into one contradictory whole: men who weep genuinely and unashamedly at the destruction of our waters and wetlands while simultaneously demanding the president lift the moratorium on drilling. The Gulf of Mexico is a beautiful thing… especially when it is viewed from the platform of a billion dollar enterprise.

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth. (King Lear V, iii)

Guest Post by Tory Gordon, Recent Graduate from Tulane Univeristy’s Department of Theatre & Dance

There has been a great gap in New Orleans’ recent theatrical feast. Despite the surge of theatrical activity since Katrina, there has been a lack of exchange of strong theatrical criticism. It leaves our otherwise impressive development incomplete, because any vibrant artistic movement is made of three parts: idea, action, and evaluation. Without evaluation, especially in as ephemeral an enterprise as theatre, art is missing an essential component: the articulation of audience perceptions. Someone has to record what has happened. If they do not, the tree falls in the forest with no one to speak of its majestic demise. In fact, you can make the case that without a strong critical apparatus the art that is growing around us will degenerate into a solipsistic celebration until finally expiring under a promiscuous mess of self-aggrandizement. To put it simple, if no one is able to call out the quality, or lack thereof, of our product things will not get better.

If only it were a matter of a few well-spoken critics armed with notebooks and laptops, we could recruit a class of evaluators and be done with it. Then we could all go back to our arts where those freshly minted critics will praise us while slaughtering our theatrical rivals. But a theatrical component as important as critical evaluation is not a piece to merely lock into place. It is part of a greater system of interaction.  This is not a one, two, three demarcation of duty, but it is instead a roiling. Ideas, actions, and evaluations work together, interrupting one another, to make sense of what was and what was to come. In short, it is all rehearsal, all process, for the larger, always unfinished prospect of performance.

But here in New Orleans, we are not finished with the unfinished: the switch has not been thrown to complete the circuit. There are plenty of ideas, and there is plenty of action. However, since this theatrical insurgency began, this theatre community has found a large space empty of evaluation, reengagement or genuinely constructive criticism. And with the elimination of the great promoter of theatre at The Times Picayune the situation has grown graver. The space for evaluation, which is always there, is too often filled with snarky elitism disguised as hip knowingness or non-participatory bitterness cloaked in righteous indignation. In other words, my work is better than yours, because my grad degree is better than yours; or your work sucks, because I was not involved. Sound familiar? Such criticism is reductive, syllogistic, and ultimately fails to engage with actual work. The only genuine response to such an attack, outside of a rapid blow to the deliverer’s nose, is to walk off into the woods to search for enlightenment in the shadow of the majestically fallen tree.

And yet, those models of criticism are not the biggest dangers to the examinations of the new theatrical enterprise that surrounds us all. It is slavish praise that is the actual poison. At least a harsh ad hominem attack can engender a constructive response from the constitutionally fortified, sometimes even a call to action. An uneducated, unformed attack can sometimes have the benefit of pointing out the flaw in a work while offering the wrong solution: right diagnosis, wrong prescription. But what does one do with, “you’re so handsome,” other than say thank you? Should you examine the cause of your handsomeness in order to improve upon said condition? Almost everyone reading my words right now has been told the following phrase: you’re so talented. It feels quite good to hear it, even from Great Aunt Irma. However, what few of us realize is that statement is as immensely reductive as is an ad hominem attack. It is possibly even more paralyzing, because it narcoticizes the receiver into believing there is no work to be done. After all, if you are so talented, so handsome, what is the point of doing any more work? Euphoric pluperfection reigns!

Criticism, actual criticism, requires we drop the dagger from one hand and the laurel wreath from the other. It is called constructive criticism, because it requires skills in construction, the construction of ideas. Replacing the objects of destruction and extravagant praise with actual tools of improvement is difficult because it requires actual work… from both parties. Those who wish to criticize must hone their skills of insight through the study of trends and theories in their field, craft the ability to organize their insights coherently, and develop patience to articulate those insights in the face of what will be initial resistance. Those who are on the receiving end of such engagement must descend from their pedestals or crosses, listen to what is being said, and only reengage after time has passed to allow cooling to occur. Furthermore, none of this can occur unless all parties have reached informal or formal contract that those are the rules. After all, giving your carefully considered thoughts to an unrepentant egomaniac or sitting still for criticism from those who wish you ill is also a waste of your precious time. It is almost as bad as being late for rehearsal.

Consider this blog that contract. Do not panic. There is no new marshal in town, and flats that shake with slamming doors and unlearned lines are still relatively safe. I will avoid settling old grudges and will not start any new ones. This blog is not for that purpose. It seeks to uplift the dialogue. It is a critique of the ideas percolating in our community, on our stages, and typed into blogs or print. I will call you out on your ideas; I hope you will return the courtesy. Every Friday this blog will post, and I will use it for threefold purpose: to talk about the goings on of this festival, to engage in the trends of the local theatre scene, and to expose you to Shakespearean trends throughout the country and across the Atlantic. I invite guest columnists and thoughtful responses.

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser. (Henry IV, Part 2)

Director Buzz Podewell has a beautiful collection of quote’s for Love’s Labor’s Lost that we would like to share.

The play is full of the problem of what to do with the mind. Shall it be filled with study, or spent in society, or burnt in a passion, or totured by striving for style, or left as it is?
-John Masefield

Language cannot exist in a vacuum.  Even on what may seem to be its most trivial and humorous levels, it is an instrument of communication between people which demands that the speaker should consider the nature and feelings of the hearer.  In love, above all, this is true… Gently but firmly, the men are sent away to learn … how to accomodate speech to facts and to emotional realtities, as opposed to using it as a means of evasion, idle amusement, or unthinking cruelty.
-Anne Barton

Here are two people, and they start seeing each other, and at a certain point something deeper starts to happen…The time comes when one of them wants to declare that he loves the other: it is a statement of commitment that he finally feels necessary to declare to the other person…. As he says, “I love you,” all the movies he has ever seen come rushing between him and the other person.  Immediately he starts to comapre what is happening to him with a filmed romance.  He experiences the hollowness of the words–there seems to be an absence and in fact, as he says, “I love you,” he sneakily feels he lies.  These two people are standing together, with Shelley Winters and Gary Cooper right between them, and the experience they are having doesn’t resemble the thing that happeend when Shelley Winters said it to Gary Cooper at all.
-Joseph Chaikin

[The young people’s use of language and style in the play] is a movingly humane experiment…turning what is so often taken in Berowne’s own self-critical terms as ‘maggot ostentation’ into a desperate attempt to find a mode in which their turbulent emotional life can find expression.
-Jeremy Treglown

The sudden, shocking news of death at the end [of the play] breaks a very beautiful spell.  But it also betokens the beginning of something of immeasurable importance: the knowledge of Death…the young are ignorant of Death…. and that is very difficult for the older, the knowledgeable to tolerate, even to acknowledge.  The behavior of the death-ignorant young seems selfish, self-indulgent, silly, callous, even cruel… Whatever else is experienced and discovered, Death is the knowledge which must inevitably and irrevocably be known.
-Catherine Itzen

What is our life? A play of passion.
And what our mirth but music of division?
Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be
Where we are drest for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is
Who sits and marks what here we do amiss.
The graves that hide us from the searching sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus playing post we to our latest rest,
And then we die, in earnest, not in jest.
-Sir Walter Raleigh

From our 2009 season, King Lear.