Audition Announcement: The Well-Made Play

What is this show?

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: a group of estranged friends of family members are meeting after a long absence for some occasion, maybe a meal. Someone has a secret, and eventually that secret gets revealed, leaving a trail of broken relationships and changed people in its wake. Is it A Doll’s House? Or Oedipus Rex? Or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? Trick question — it’s ALL of them.

And now we’re going to improvise it.

We will tell grounded stories where old friends and dysfunctional families wrestle with dark secrets — stories full of uneasy lies, and raw vulnerability, and the kinds of choices that mean nothing can ever be the same again. We’re shooting for “Austin Secrets, but narrative”, with performances that play like new scripted dramas you might see in black-box theaters across the country. Good reference points are Proof, August: Osage County, and The Humans.

Why are we doing this show?

Theater is over two thousand years old -- it started in myth, ritual, and, yes, improvisation, and it grew from there. The Well-Made Play is a format that has served western theater from Sophocles to Ibsen to Tennessee Williams, and it's time for it to return to its improv roots.

Aristotle said theater is a tool that teaches us about ourselves: when we watch other people go through the hardest moments of their lives, it teaches us what it means to be human. We want the audience to have that catharsis. We want them to know that people can face down the worst and, one way or another, get through it. It’s not easy, but you survive. And we want audiences on the edges of their seats, knowing that we’re all making it up as we go along, just like we all do in real life when we face hard times.

To quote Kazuo Ishiguro, “Stories are about one person saying to another: This is how it feels to me. Can you understand me? Does it also feel this way to you?”

You in?

Auditions are Sunday, May 13, 2018! Sign up here today!