KCACTF’s Region 7 Next Step Auditions

“Hi, I’m here for the Next Step Auditions,” I tell the spiky-haired man with the clipboard ushering a hallway of college students into a line. “Anna Rose from B Street Theatre,” I say offering my hand. “Oh!” His face snaps from jaded to surprise. “I thought you were a student,” he says, shaking my hand. “Right this way.”

The spiky-haired man opens a metal door, and I walk into a black box filled with a piano and eight tables lined with casting representatives. I slip into an empty chair. An assistant hands me a stack of headshots and resumes. Another assistant hands me a master audition list and the day’s schedule. Five minutes later, the first group walks in. Nerves fill the room.

It’s February 20, 2013, and I’m auditioning candidates at KCACTF’s Region 7 Next Step Auditions for the 2013-2014 B Street Theatre Professional Acting Internship. We are accepting six acting interns, and we still have another conference to attend. A year ago, I was on that stage, another college senior with a theatre degree desperate for employment, only my stage was at SETC, Southeastern Theatre Conference. I am four months into my directing internship with B Street Theatre, and I am on the other side of the table. My only thought is, “Am I qualified for this?”

The first actor walks to the center of the room, slates, and begins her monologue. I pick up my pen, begin jotting notes on her resume, and… I’m fine. I know this— this watching and analyzing actors. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done for the past decade. All I have to do is answer the question: Can this person act on a professional level? My insecurities take the day off.

The actors are college students, mostly undergraduate with the occasional M.F.A. candidate. They are auditioning for summer and/or year-long employment. Some are finishing an associate’s degree and looking to transfer to a four-year program.

One by one actors take the stage. Hopeful. Buzzed. Ambitious. From 9am to 6pm I watch actors enter, talk, and leave. Enter, talk, and leave. Enter, talk, and leave. Some seem to have no training. Many have potential. A few should be being paid. Mostly, they are college students with big dreams and little experience. The disparity between my piles of “call back” and “recycle” grows.

Throughout the day, I add to the call-back list posted on the bulletin board outside the audition room. To reach the list, I have to shimmy through a permanent mass of eyes searching the wall for their names. “Excuse me. Pardon me,” I repeat, taking down the yellow paper and returning a few minutes later, the list a little longer. I repin it, and moving away, the crowd rushes forward, fingers scanning fresh ink.

When I see actors I called back, I introduce myself and shake their hand, telling them I enjoyed their audition and am calling them back for B Street Theatre’s Professional Acting Internship call back. I say I hope to see them there.

Not a single actor approaches me, introduces him/herself, asks me a question. I wonder if they want a job. I decide they have never been taught that theatres hire people, not auditions or headshots or resumes, and to get hired, they either need connections or they need to make themselves into a person amid the piles of faces and paper.

After 9 hours of auditions, I call back 36 actors. 25 show up. I had posted the call backs for 7:00pm-10:00pm, expecting the actors to trickle in throughout the three-hours. When I walk into the room at 6:45pm, they’re all there.

“Hi,” I say, walking to the center of the room, 50 eyeballs following me, “thank you for coming.” Taking advantage of the large audience, I outline B Street Theatre and its Professional Internship Program before beginning individual call backs. I don’t seduce them into the program. I dissuade them. Because the B Street Theatre Internship is hard. It’s 80-90 hours a week, working 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week for 8 months, no vacations. Acting interns spend 15-60 hours per week in their concentration and the other 65-30 hours per week making the theatre go—cleaning, running errands, loading the set, building the set, changing-over the set, striking the set, working bar, leaf blowing the parking lot, washing costumes, and whatever else anyone at B Street asks them to do, because everyone one, except another intern, is your boss. But at the end of the (long) day, acting interns have performed 1-3 shows or spent 10 hours in rehearsal or taken a class or all three.

Telling the actors the program’s reality, I watch steel enter their eyes. They lean closer, almost salivating, eyes glinting. I know that look; it’s an alloy of passion and ambition burnished in desperation. It’s a look that says, “Bring it on.” It’s the look I wore a year ago sitting across from Buck Busfield, B Street Theatre’s Artistic Director, as he described the internship. It’s the look I still wear when I’m presented with a chance to skid broadside across concrete to do the work that makes sleep and food and showers and anywhere else in the world unnecessary—like my current project directing the intern showcase outside an 85-hour workweek.

The more I talk, the more they hear: “Work." The grit just adds romanticism.

I should have known. Theatre people love to work, and they love to work hard. They open a vein, drain it on stage, and get off on it. So telling a 20-something theatre crowd that in this internship you work morning, day, and night, that it’s is all-consuming, that it will take everything from you, that you will fiercely love it and fiercely hate it and consider leaving theatre forever and, ultimately, learn more about your craft than you ever have in your life…well, it’s lighting a spark in a powder keg.

When I interviewed for this internship, I told Buck the position sounded like touching fire—terrifying and magnetic. Looking at their eyes, metallic ambition, they want to grab that flame with both hands.

Good. We want people who are hungry.

-Anna Rose

Assistant Directing Pail of Grace

As B Street Theatre’s Directing Intern, I assistant direct (AD) under Artistic Director Buck Busfield. The first show I ADed at B Street was Pail of Grace, the holiday comedy written and directed by Buck himself. AD is the vaguest title in theatre. It’s a role determined by the director’s requirements and the assistant’s capabilities. Some ADs co-direct; some run lines with actors; some fetch coffee. New to Buck’s directing style and to B Street’s rehearsal process, I printed script rewrites and observed rehearsals. (Assistant to the Director is a more apt title.)

One of the first things I witnessed is B Street operates under a dynamic little replicated across the country. The theatre opened in 1986 with many of its acting company members joining around this time. As one actor stated, “[When B Street opened,] Buck went around Sacramento, picked the best actors, and locked them in a room for 20 years.” Of the five cast members in P of G, three have been with B Street for 20 years and two for 10 years. It’s not uncommon to hear actors in their early forties laughing over shows they did together when they were 19. Ergo, walking into rehearsal is walking into decades of inside jokes, stories, insight, and an incredible ability to fuck with one another, a perspicacity they enact with relish.

This history shapes the production’s development. Buck knows where each actor will be at each point of rehearsal in his/her character development, line memorization, spatial awareness, and story comprehension. He knows how and when to direct the actors as a group and as individuals. They, in turn, know him and each other just as well, forming a playfulness, trust, and collaboration unique to B Street. They challenge each other, break each other, ground each other, and push each other’s buttons. In the end, they deliver a professional production.

When tech began, I transitioned from AD to stagehand, moving sets and maintaining costumes. Being present from production meetings through closing night, I absorbed the life cycle of my first B Street production— its rhythms, politics, idiosyncrasies, and characters. When the play closed, three other shows had been in rehearsal for two weeks and were skidding into tech. The wheel never slows at B Street, but on the brink of screaming, it’ll keep you laughing. Here’s to another round.

-Anna Rose

Pour House

It’s 11:45pm on a Saturday, and I’m at the theatre, stuffing the last of the trash in a dumpster when Megan’s phone dings. “Get to Pour House. 20^th and P. Great drinks, live music, and people. Bring Anna Rose. – Claire.” Megan reads the text aloud and looks at me, brows raised over signature big eyes and says, “Anna Rose, you’re coming.”

I’m the intern who stays behind, who arrives late and slips out early to go to coffee shops, who has refused the bar scene again and again for a quieter, more solitary setting to end the day. But this time, I reply, “I’ll see you there,” swinging leg over bike and pedaling off, away from the stream of fourteen hour days, away from the small circle of co-workers and patrons who have become my only contact with humanity since starting at the B Street.

A few turns and several red lights later, I arrive.

It’s beautiful.

In a whiskey lit room of dark wood against a back wall of glass bottles kindle people. Standing, sitting, laughing, drinking, flirting, talking, singing. People.

I join my group in a back corner, but instead of slipping into the booth, I grab a bar chair and swing it against the wall to look over the vista of young 20 year-olds out on a Saturday night.

A girl runs her hand through her brown curls, laughing with two boys, sliding her eyes to the one in the white shirt. The band—a bald guitarist and a mustached drummer—switch from country to Irish, and a boy with black frames and red hair serenades his friend, his straw a mike. A waitress with gold hair and silver nose ring serves amber drinks garnished green. The bartender in starched shirt and suspenders fixes the ladder rolling across the library of a different sort of knowledge.

I haven’t had a drink, but I want to run to every person, throw my arms around them, kiss them fat and full on the lips, announcing, “I’m so happy you’re here! You’re beautiful!” I want to push White Shirt into Curly Brunette’s arms, duet with Black Frames, and toss money to Ms. Gold Hair and Suspenders.

I want to celebrate their humanity and this Saturday night out, away, elsewhere, not at the theatre, not at the rehearsal hall, not at the apartment, but here, in this bar, surrounded by people who may have never heard of B Street Theatre, who may have never attended a play or have read a script and who aren’t asking me to scrub toilets or to send emails.

Now and then I dip into the booth’s conversation, but it rings of work, so I return to my roost, roving near-watering eyes, wanting to jump on the bar and proclaim like a reverse Walt Whitman, “I celebrate you, and sing you…Stop this day and night with me and we shall posses the origin of all poems!”

Instead, I perch. Observing. Singing an internal paean.

Half the work booth leaves, chatter puttering. Curly Brunette gets White Shirt alone; she licks her straw. The band plays their last song, riffing good-night, Black Frames trilling past the final note. Bartender starts wiping the bar.

Then the clock strikes one, whiskey light turning harsh white, and Ms. Gold Hair starts collecting glasses.

I say my good-byes, wrap my scarf, clip my helmet, and glancing around one last time, I walk out, pedaling back to the apartment and to the routine that follows that for one night broke wide open.

-Anna Rose

Intern Insight: With 12 to 14 hour work days, 6 days a week being the norm, people and places outside B Street Theatre become an exoticism to B Street interns, ready for another day at the B Street. 

About the Internship

The B Street Theatre Intern Company is an intensive 8-month program for actors and 10-month program for stage managers that immerses young theatre professionals in every aspect of professional theatre. Interns are recent college graduates seeking their firs post-college, professional theatre experience. The intern experience provides talented young people with their first real “break” in the world of professional performing arts.

Classwork 
Acting classes focus on monologues, scene work as well as instruction in improvisation for the actor. Two classes per week are scheduled with B Street Acting Company members.

The Monologue 
Each intern will receive instruction in the art of the monologue. Interns will learn a minimum of twenty-five monologues, performing each of them before a live audience on a weekly basis.

Performance 
Acting interns will have the opportunity to audition for approximately 15 professional productions. Interns appear regularly in all three series offered at the Theatre, which includes B Street Mainstage, B3 Series and Family Series productions. Interns have played prominent roles in recent productions of Doubt, Rabbit Hole, Make Someone Happy and Escanaba in Da Moonlight. Acting interns have also been featured in numerous Family Series productions. Interns also act in one of three School Tour productions throughout the year.

Directing Internship 
This internship allows for up to two directing interns to work as assistant directors as well as the opportunity to direct the intern showcase.

Technical Theatre Internship 
The Technical Theatre Internship program gives young designers and stage managers an opportunity to work and design at the professional level. Working under the tutelage of B Street Theatre’s Artistic Director, Associate Producer and Technical Director, interns will design sets, lights, costumes and sound for B Street productions, and receive full professional credit for each design. During their flexible, paid internships, they will design and build sets specifically tailored to each intern.

Housing 
The B Street Theatre provides subsidized housing. All intern housing units are within walking distance to the theatre. Theatre patrons have also donated several bicycles for the use of the intern company.

Showcase 
The entire intern company will participate in one or two showcases a year. These performances have played to full capacity houses for the past few years. Past performances have included The Laramie Project, Dearly Departed and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

Career Guidance Interns will be given guidance on such topics as headshots and resumes; approaching and dealing with agents, managers, and producers, and how to survive the business.

Equity Card 
Equity memberships will be offered upon completion of the eight-month acting internship.

In exchange for training and professional performing experience, interns provide the company with much needed assistance in the areas of administration as well as back and front of house operations. Interns are provided with a weekly stipend and housing.

How to apply: Auditions and interviews are held at the annual Southeastern Theatre Conference. Information atwww.setc.org Or you may email or mail a headshot, audition video, and resume or a design portfolio and resume to Producing Artistic Director Buck Busfield at 2711 B Street, Sacramento, CA 95816. No phone calls please.

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About B Street Theatre

What are the Top 10 Things I should know about the B Street Theatre?

1. Founded in 1986
2. 16 plays produced per year (7 B Street Mainstage, 4 Family Series, 4 B3 Series, 1 Special Engagement)
3. More than 900 performances per year (over 330 B Street, 330 Family Series performances, 200 B3 Series, 50 Special Engagement)
4. More than 10,000 Subscribers (7,311 B Street Mainstage and 2,174 Family Series, 551 B3….OK, OK….we actually have 10,036 subscribers if you want to be exact! This means 68% of available B Street seats are filled with subscribers; 71% for Family Series)
5. Music Circus, with a 2,000-seat venue, has 11,000 subscribers. Sacramento Theatre Company has 2,800.
6. Total attendance per year is over 110,000 (75,000 B Street, 25,000 Family Series and 11,000 B3)
7. Music Circus’ total attendance per year is 130,000. Sacramento Theatre Company’s is approximately 48,000.
8. We serve 200,000 kids PER YEAR in 12 counties through our long-standing outreach program, The B Street Theatre School Tour.
9. B Street Theatre is the second largest performing arts organization in Sacramento. This year’s budget is $2.2 million.
10. All B Street actors are working professionals. The company casts from a small pool of local professionals as well as from professional, union actors residing in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Each year, the Theatre spends over $900,000 on professional talent.

What are the specifics of the performance programs?

• B Street Theatre School Tour. It all started when we took the rich experience of live theatre into schools throughout Northern California. Our innovative approach has provided cultural enrichment to more than 2.5 million school children and youth in underserved communities throughout the 12 counties that surround Sacramento. In 1989 our B Street School Tour was named “Honorary Children’s Theatre of California” by California’s Secretary of State.
• B Street Theatre Mainstage. Not content to rest on our laurels as a groundbreaking children’s theatre company, we broadened our scope in 1991 by creating the B Street Theatre Mainstage with new plays for adults. Since then we have delivered thought-provoking productions to more than 600,000 people. Many plays produced each year are world, national, West Coast or regional premieres. Much honored locally and regionally, B Street Theatre has been named “Top performing small professional theatre” west of the Mississippi by the Actors Equity Association.
• B Street Family Series. In the spring of 2002 we expanded our children’s programming with the B Street Family Series, which offers performances of new works and classic children’s literature in a fixed theatre setting. Children and families enjoy these lively productions throughout the school year with performances for school field trips during the week and for the public on weekends. Curriculum materials are developed for each Family Series production, and teachers are encouraged to develop classroom lessons based on themes from each play.
• B3 Series. With B Street Theatre subscriptions SOLD OUT for another season, we realized that the demand for more theatre from the B Street model was too compelling to be ignored. We introduced our newest program in 2007 with the B3 Series, which shares space with the Family Series. Taking a more serious, dramatic focus with new contemporary plays for the more sophisticated theatergoer, B3 opened with the Pulitzer Prize winning drama Rabbit Hole.

What else does the theatre organization have to offer? 
In addition to our four performance programs, we continue to offer classes in technique and scene study to adults through our B Street Conservatory and to provide professional theatre experience through our B Street Internship program. Our summer camp program for kids is an important part of our outreach and education effort.

What is the future for B Street Theatre? 
The organization will survive in today’s competitive entertainment environment by consistently producing top-quality work and maintaining a healthy balance sheet. B Street Theatre will also educate our community, especially youth, who are the artists, technicians and leaders of the future, about the power of collaboration and the importance of creativity.

Will the B Street Theatre stage productions for the children who are patients at the new Sutter Women & Children’s Center?
Yes, the theatre already has a working relationship with Sutter Medical Center Sacramento to bring the theatre to children who are hospitalized. This relationship will continue once the new Women's & Children’s Center is built.

What is B Street Theatre’s financial position? 
The innovation and originality of our productions are backed by sound management. Operating in the black since 1997, our annual revenues now exceed $2.7 million—more than 75% from earned revenues with the remainder from philanthropic contributions and in-kind gifts.

Tell me more about the management of the theatre? 
Our nonprofit B Street organization is governed by a community Board of Directors. Producing Artistic Director Buck Busfield continues his 22 years of leadership with hands-on artistic management and extraordinary vision. Our founding director Timothy Busfield is now working as a producer and director in Los Angeles.

Why the new theatre? 
For more than 24 years it has been our dream to build a performing arts center that raises the quality of our facility to the quality of our productions. With a long history of steady growth, we are now poised for expansion with a new building to house our theatres, our educational programs and our staff. True to the B Street legacy, though, this isn’t going to be just any theatre. Our project represents a new, exciting and innovative public-private partnership model - with Sutter Medical Center providing the land and the City of Sacramento providing a community reinvestment grant for project development costs.

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Meet the 2012-2013 Professional Interns

Meg Tracy, Props Intern

Graduated from: Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Production Design

Favorite show I’ve been in: Macbeth

In ten years I plan to be: a Master Props Artisan 

If I had two super powers they would be: Moving through solid objects at will & super strength

Favorite Quote: "Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it."- Oscar Wilde

Kaitlin Brucker, Stage Management Intern

Graduated from: University of Memphis with a BFA in Theatre Design and Technical Production
Favorite show I’ve been in: W;t by Margaret Edson at University of Memphis and Red by John Logan at B Street Theatre
In ten years I plan to be doing: Stage management and/or company management for a national tour
If I had two super powers they would be: Telepathy and the ability to calm any tense environment
Favorite Quote: "Nothing is impossible, the world itself says, ‘I'm possible’". - Audrey Hepburn

Sarah Clancy, Acting Intern

Graduated from: Elon University with a BFA in Acting
Favorite show I’ve been in: Jake's Women with Elon University and Godspell with Open Fields
In ten years I plan to be doing: Plan your life and watch God laugh. He's already gotten a couple of good jokes out of me.
If I had two super powers they would be: 1.) snapping my fingers and being anywhere in the world and 2.) always knowing where my keys, wallet, phone and other things I spend way too much time "misplacing" are.
Favorite Quote: "It's all about perspective - for the lobsters aboard the Titanic, the iceberg was a small miracle."

"A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything."

Andy Rathburg, Acting Intern

Graduated from:  Principia College with a BA in Theater

Favorite show you have been in:  Avenue Q as Princeton

In ten years I plan to be doing:  well for myself.  Either living off a career in acting, outdoor education, baking, competitive eating.  Possibly a combination of those.

If I had two super powers they would be:  The ability to manipulate time, and to have a magical device that fits in my pocket that allows me to contact anyone in the world and get any information I need.

Favorite Quote:  "The duty of a patriot is to protect their country from its government."  -Thomas Paine

Claire Rigsby, Acting Intern

Graduated from: Emory University with a BA in Theater Studies and a BA in Psychology

Favorite show I’ve been in: 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee as Logainne Shwartzandgrubenierre

In ten years I plan to be doing: Challenging work that still scares and excites me!

If I had two super powers they would be: Invisibility and the ability to add hours to the day (probably to sleep).

Favorite Quote: "The core of (wo)mans' spirit comes from new experiences." - Christopher McCandless

Sam Arnold, Acting Intern

Graduated from: Florida State University with a BFA in Acting

Favorite show I’ve been in: Danny and the Deep Blue Sea

In ten years I plan to be doing: I plan to be acting as well as teaching at the University Level. 

If I had two super powers they would be: To shoot spaghetti from my fingertips and the ability to touch a book and instantly know everything inside

Favorite Quote: "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called 'the present.'"

Anna Rose MacArthur, Directing Intern

Graduated from: Birmingham-Southern College with a BA in Theatre Arts and English

Favorite show I’ve been in: assistant directing RENT at BSC

In ten years I plan to be doing: traveling the world collecting, sharing, and creating stories

If I had two super powers they would be: fluency in every language and instantaneous travel to my family

Favorite Quote: "Forget safety.

Live where you fear to live.

Destroy your reputation.

Be notorious."

- Rumi

Megan Jane West, Stage Management Intern

Graduated from: Harding University with a BA in Theatre Arts

Favorite show you have been in: The Effects of Gamma Rays on

Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds

In ten years I plan to be doing: Production Stage Management at a

professional theatre and hold an MFA in Stage/Production Management

If I had two super powers they would be: Teleportation and mind reading

Perfect breakfast: anything after 10am! ... eggs, bacon, hash-browns,

biscuits and gravy

Favorite Quote: "It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our

hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."

- Lady Croom from Arcadia

Marking Time

The earth offered a November of leaves bursting into sunset and five days of rain that tore the leaves from the trees to rot ankle deep in the streets. But the street cleaners came and the clouds disappeared and leaves slipped from branch tips overnight, and all was as it was before— green sunlight days passing through 55 degree breezes to slip into 40 degree nights just as they did the day before and the day before that and every day since the day I skidded into Sacramento two months ago to begin a Professional Directing Internship with B Street Theatre.

Since arriving, the world has offered no indication that that the earth has tilted and traced the near completion of its revolve, so people mark time in a city that will not. Dates change on phones. Stores flip signs from open to closed. Decorations appear and disappear in lawns and store windows—Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas. Currently, icicles line roofs and snowflakes hang behind glass, creating a winter the city will never see. Instead, nature notes winter with citrus hanging fat and bright as summer in the trees.

To prevent these months in Sacramento from blurring into an arch of greens, yellows, and midnight blues, this blog will mark time here, narrating the B Street Theatre Internship for B Street patrons, prospective interns, and our beloveds with whom we wish to share this experience.

-Anna Rose

Midtown, Sacramento