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.