Sara Morgan, Taylor Henderson, Dominique Salerno
Artist In Residence Robert Salerno Directs Outstanding Cast
Dominique Salerno, Taylor Henderson
If you’re an actor, you’ve had this nightmare, but it was never this hilarious!
THE STORY: This play was inspired by the well known dream that many people in
professional and amateur theatre have, that they go must perform in a play that
they have inexplicably never been to rehearsals for, and for which they know
neither the lines or the plot. So in this play George is an accountant who wanders
onto an empty stage, not certain where he is or how he got there. The stage
manager informs him he’s the understudy, and must go on in a few minutes.
George doesn’t know his name, doesn’t think
he’s an actor (“I think I’m an accountant”), and has
no idea what play he’s supposed to do. He’s pushed onstage dressed
as Hamlet, and finds himself opposite a glamorous actress who seemingly is in
Noel Coward’s Private Lives. George does his best to guess the lines,
and guess appropriate behavior, but then the actress leaves, and suddenly a
new actor comes in, spouting Shakespearean verse (from Hamlet). This is much
harder to guess, and after a while George is left alone and must improvise his
own Shakespearean soliloquy. In the closing sections, George finds himself thrust
into a Samuel Beckett play (a combination of Waiting for Godot and Endgame),
which he has very little knowledge of. And then suddenly he’s Sir Thomas
More in the historical drama A Man for All Seasons, facing a beheading for opposing
Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boylen – and alarmingly the executioner
seems more real than he should.
at the
The Sixteenth Annual Actors Festival
SD Rep's Lyceum Theatre, Horton Plaza
PRESS COVERAGE:
http://www.sdnews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/07/13/44b6e635704df
http://www.sdnews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/07/20/44c0145e9139e