Choose Me

Dispatch from Tacoma Little Theatre's
tryouts for The Star-Spangled Girl

On a Sunday night in late June, a play waits to be born. In the lobby of the Tacoma Little Theatre, a table unfolds. Stacks of paper are arranged. Copies are made, coffee is sipped, voices rise and fall.

Casi Wilkerson, the director of theatre operations, enters from the office. A petite, sparkly blonde, she doesn’t look like a general (but neither did Napoleon). She marches across the room, papers in her arms, keys rattling. “Let’s talk about the urinal,” she says. “The urinal is always a problem.”

The troops follow to the men’s room, and the 2010 TLT season begins.

In his first full season at TLT, artistic director Scott Campbell has scheduled a full slate of comedies in an effort to brighten dark times (see page 20 for news about this particular theatre’s endangered status). Two months from tonight, on August 28, the lights will dawn on Scene 1 of Neil Simon’s Star-Spangled Girl. Set in San Francisco in the late 1960s, it is the story of two young ideologues, Andy and Norman, who run a dissident magazine called “Fallout.” Andy handles business, Norman does the writing. Andy is Laurel, Norman is Hardy. Andy can’t smell Sophie, the fruit-cake-giving, allegiance-pledging Arkansas girl next door. Norman, however, can — and that’s all it takes for him to fall in love.

“You look like an Andy,” director Elliot Weiner tells me. “You should try out.”

Illustrations by Sean Alexander

I was planning to keep to the sidelines, studying the mechanics of staging a play. But Weiner, like any good director, has a talent for coaxing wallflowers out of the shadows. Tall and stately, even in jeans, he has the air of a seasoned Shakespearean. And as the author of several psychology books, he clearly knows a few things about human nature. Flattering and baiting, he soon has me wondering if I might be the next Marlon Brando.

I’m relieved when a real actor arrives for the audition, a young man in slacks and loafers. He proves a worthier match for Weiner.

“You must be Samantha,” Weiner deadpans, running his finger down a list of names.

“Sometimes I think I am.”

“You look right for the part.”

“I think so.”

“That’s what every actor should think. Can you do mime?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Don’t do it. I hate mime,” says Weiner. “You know, we pay in pizza and water.”

“Good. That’s what I run on.”

More actors file in as Wilkerson bustles about the lobby, stage managers Jason and Tanya Carter in tow.

“What’s the policy on soda?” someone asks.

Weiner watches carefully. “The thing about being a director is, you pick the right people and get out of the way,” he tells me. “The director’s job is to take it from good to ‘Oh, my God!’”

That job starts with casting, a three-part process: auditions, callbacks and agonizing decisions.

The play is just paper and ink until auditions begin. Now it becomes a lively, clumsy, sporadically brilliant display. One by one, actors stand front and center. They introduce themselves and perform a brief monologue. Next, they read from the script opposite Scott Brown, a theatre veteran in a Seahawks jersey. One actor sits down, another goes blank and another fights a cold. A man tries out for Andy and nails Norman, and a woman summons a perfect drawl for the punchline “ . . . especially canned goods!”

Weiner takes video and notes as he sits surrounded by props from the last production: chairs, lamps, drums, cymbals, an old-fashioned radio. During breaks, he and Brown dissect performances. Weiner will share his assessments, pro and con, when he calls each candidate tomorrow. Serious actors, he tells me, want feedback.
Three nights later, after hours of video have been viewed and reviewed, after faces, voices and styles have been studied, the hopeful actors have been pared down from sixteen to eight — four men and four women.

A comedy is like a bubble, Weiner tells the squadron gathered for callbacks, “and our job is to keep it floating for two hours.” One false moment, and the bubble bursts.

To avoid this false moment, Weiner needs talent. But more important than individual faculty is a balanced, compatible ensemble. The Star-Spangled Girl, a love triangle, must be composed of congruous sides. Weiner hopes to find one, and then two more to match.

“You’ve got to put your stick in the sand,” he says. Then you arrange the other pieces around it.

Early in callbacks, the stick plants itself. Blake York, a young, jowly John Candy type, seems the clear choice for Norman. While he reads faster than Weiner would like, he is the funniest and most endearing of the actors. His manic energy takes up a lot of space; his costars must be chosen to accommodate. Weiner tests dozens of groupings during the two-hour session. The results are inspiring, if ambiguous.

“I could put pictures on a dartboard, blindfold myself and throw,” and score three worthy actors, he tells the group, handing out a round of Junior Mints.

Afterwards, when the lights are out and the doors are locked, Weiner crosses the street to the Parkway Tavern, and I wonder if throwing darts isn’t exactly what he plans to do.

The next evening, I receive an e-mail. The calls — the dreaded, difficult calls — have been made. The roster of eight has been whittled down to three: Blake York as Norman, Luke Amundson as Andy and Gretchen Boyt as Sophie.

The play is born. The work has just begun.