AWAKE AND SING! - Philadelphia EPA
Quintessence Theatre Group
AUDITION DATES
Tue, Jul 17, 2018
12:00 pm - 8:00 pm (EDT)
Break 4:00-5:00 pm
Wed, Jul 18, 2018
10:00 am - 2:00 pm (EDT)
APPOINTMENTS
Maya Lerman Artistic@QuintessenceTheatre.org
CONTRACT
SPT $425 weekly minimum
SEEKING
Equity actors of all ethnicities for various roles. Please see breakdown for details. Quintessence is committed to diversity in casting.
PREPARATION
Sides to be presented with audition appointment.
LOCATION
Sedgwick Cultural Center
7137 Germantown Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19119
There is free parking in the public lot across the street from 7137. Please check in at the theatre. Some auditions/callbacks may be held in adjacent rehearsal space.
PERSONNEL
Director: Max Shulman (expected to attend)
Artistic Associate: Lee Cortopassi (expected to attend)
OTHER DATES
First Rehearsal: January 2
Opening: January 26
Closing: February 17
OTHER
An Equity Monitor will not be provided. The producer will run all aspects of this audition.
Equity’s contracts prohibit discrimination. Equity is committed to diversity and encourages all its employers to engage in a policy of equal employment opportunity designed to promote a positive model of inclusion. As such, Equity encourages performers of all ethnicities, gender identities, and ages, as well as performers with disabilities, to attend every audition.
Always bring your Equity Membership card to auditions.
BREAKDOWN
Bessie Berger (40s – 60s) – as she herself states, is not only the mother in this home but also the father. She is constantly arranging and taking care of her family. She loves life, likes to laugh, has great resourcefulness and enjoys living from day to day. A high degree of energy accounts for her quick exasperation at ineptitude. She is a shrewd judge of realistic qualities in people in the sense of being able to gauge quickly their effectiveness. In her eyes all of the people in the house are equal. She is naïve and quick in emotional response. She is afraid of utter poverty. She is proper according to her own standards, which are fairly close to those of most middle-class families. She knows that when one lives in the jungle one must look out for the wild life.
Myron Berger (40s – 60s) – her husband, is a born follower. He would like to be a leader. He would like to make a million dollars. He is not sad or ever depressed. Life is an even sweet event to him, but the “old days” were sweeter yet. He has a dignified sense of himself. He likes people. He likes everything. But he is heartbroken without being aware of it.
Hennie Berger (24) – is a girl of 24 who has few friends, male or female. She is proud of her body. She won’t ask favors. She travels alone. She is fatalistic about being trapped, but will escape if possible. She is self-reliant in the best sense. Till the day she dies she will be faithful to a loved man. She inherits her mother’s sense of humor and energy.
Ralph Berger (20s) – is a boy with a clean spirit. He wants to know, wants to learn. He is ardent, he is romantic, he is sensitive. He is naïve too. He is trying to find why so much dirt must be cleared away before it is possible to “get to first base.”
Jacob Berger (60s – 80s) – Bessie’s father, also trying to find the right path for himself and the others. He is aware of justice, of dignity. He is an observer of the others, compares their activities with his real and ideal sense of life. This produces a reflective nature. In this home he is a constant boarder. He is a sentimental idealist with no power to turn ideal to action. With physical acts – such as housework – he putters. But as a barber he demonstrates the flair of an artist. He is an old Jew with living eyes in his tired face.
Uncle Morty (40s – 60s) is a successful American business man with five good senses. Something sinister comes out of the fact that the lives of others seldom touch him deeply. He holds to his own line of life. When is generous he wants others to be aware of it. He is pleased by attention – a rich relative to the Berger family. He is a shrewd judge of material values. He will die unmarried. Two and two make four, never five with him. He can blink in the sun for hours, a fat tomcat. Tickle him, he laughs. He lives in a penthouse with a real Japanese butler to serve him. He sleeps with dress models, but not from his own showrooms. He plays cards for hours on end. He smokes expensive cigars. He sees every Mickey Mouse cartoon that appears. He is a 32-degree Mason. He is really deeply intolerant.
Moe Axelrod (20s - 30s) lost a leg in the war. He seldom forgets that fact. He has killed two men in extra-martial activity. He is mordant, bitter. Life has taught him a disbelief in everything, but he will fight his way through. He seldom shows his feelings; fights against his own sensitivity. He has been everywhere and seen everything. All he wants is Hennie. He is very proud. He scorns the inability of others to make their way in life, but he likes people for whatever good qualities they possess. His passionate outbursts come from a strong but contained emotional mechanism.
Sam Feinschreiber (20s) wants to find a home. He is a lonely man, a foreigner in a strange land, hypersensitive about this fact, conditioned by the humiliation of not making his way alone. He has a sense of others laughing at him. At night he gets up and sits alone in the dark. He hears acutely all the small sounds of life. He might have been a poet in another time and place. He approaches his wife as if he were always offering her a delicate flower. Life is a high chill wind weaving itself around his head.
Schlooser (40s – 50s) is an overworked German whose wife ran away with another man and left him with a young daughter who in turn ran away and joined a burlesque show as a chorus girl. The man suffers rheumatic pains. He has lost his identity twenty years before.
Equity’s contracts prohibit discrimination. Equity is committed to diversity and encourages all its employers to engage in a policy of equal employment opportunity designed to promote a positive model of inclusion. As such, Equity encourages performers of all ethnicities, gender identities, and ages, as well as performers with disabilities, to audition.
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