Great Expectations: The Auditions

Here’s what auditions are like.

Would-be and experienced actors enter the Black Box and face a panel of executioners (er, directors, producers and other friendly critics) who judge the performance of the actors reading various roles.

They face Jane Jones, a founder of Seattle’s Book-It Theater, who is the director. Deborah Sparks will work with Jones to provide Orcas Center’s assistance, Linda Sanders will be the producer, and Antoinette Botsford will serve as the dramaturg, researching the cultural and historic setting of the work.

It’s striking how similar auditioning is to “cold-calling” in sales, where you must jump body and soul into a scene without the previous conversations or actions to “trigger” your response. That in itself takes great imagination and not a little courage.

At the Great Expectations auditions last week, Jones, Sparks, Sanders and Botsford viewed several auditioners for the role of Miss Havisham, the embittered bride who was abandoned at the altar and has made it her life’s purpose to punish all men. She does this by tutoring the young Estella into Miss Havisham’s own superior, non-caring, passionless personality.

Actors and actresses also auditioned for the roles of Pip, Estella, and Pumblechook, the social-climbing uncle.

As  the actors try out the roles, Jones may ask them to “switch gears” and imbue their characters with emotions that she suggests, rather than the motivations that the actors initially proposed in their reading of the characters’ lines.

Jones asked several actors to attempt a British accent.

And there’s a twist in this production. Jones has said she intends for the cast to be an ensemble, where several actors are onstage at one time, interacting with and reacting to each other. The ineffable chemistry of acting dynamics will be considered in casting the roles, and Jones is considering casting some of the women who have tried out in both the major and supporting male roles.

Jones also talks of a “muscular” production, where the characters will engage in much vigorous movement. Jones asks one auditioner, “You’re pretty sturdy when it comes to running around?”

In previous productions of “Great Expectations,” the roles of Pip, the protaganist, and Estella, have often been “double-cast” in that younger actors play the roles of the childhood Pip and Estella, while older actors play the adult characters. In this production however, one actor will play both the young and older Pip, and one actress will play the Estella as a child, and as a young woman.

What young auditioner can mature before our eyes to carry off the older, wiser Pip? Which one will be able to abandon years of experience and facility to play a young, naive orphan set upon by convicts?

Casting is expected to be announced soon.