4th Wall Stage Company 2017 Season Auditions
Location: Worcester, Massachusetts
Type: Theater
4th Wall Stage Company would like to announce the upcoming auditions for the 2017 season.
When: November 16th, 2016 – 6pm-9pm
Where: The Sprinkler Factory
38 Harlow St. Worcester MA, 01605
Awake and Sing! By Clifford Odets
May 4-20, 2017 8pm Thu, Fri, Sat
Directed by: Bill Sigalis
The eternal war between idealism and responsibility wages on. The play’s characters tilt against the twin titans of poverty and progress .Odets’s play opened on Broadway 81 years ago; it still retains its inspiring emotional pull: Its story about a struggling Jewish family in the Bronx of the mid-1930s, the Bergers, is ever youthful in its depiction of hope abutting despair, dreams fading in the light of reality, and parents battling their growing children.
Time: 1933, the height of The Great Depression
Place: The dining room and living room of a well-worn but immaculately kept apartment in the Bronx.
Roles:
Myron Berger– fifty-ish, the father of the family, a sententious failure of a man and husband, who long ago ceded authority to his imperious wife.
Bessie Berger–his wife, also in her fifties, the rock of the family. Terrified of poverty and pursuing bourgeois respectability like a hawk, even if she destroys her family chasing it. She measures people by their power to make money. She loves life, likes to laugh, has great resourcefulness, and lives day to day. A high degree of energy accounts for her quick exasperation at ineptitude. She is a shrewd judge of character.
Jacob–Bessie’s father. 70-80, lives with the Bergers. The play’s moral center. An idealist who refuses to believe that “life can be printed on dollar bills.” Jacob is a Marxist, a sentimental idealist with no power to turn ideal into action.
Ralph Berger—Bessie and Myron’s son, 21years old. Ardent, romantic, sensitive. Urged by his grandfather Jacob to escape his family’s bankrupt values, to awake and sing, and hold to something higher than survival and serve a cause larger than his own family. He awakes and sings in the last act.
Hennie Berger–Bessie and Myron’s daughter, Ralph’s older sister. After being jilted when she becomes pregnant and unable to resist her mother’s exhortations, Hennie hastily marries Sam Feinschreiber, an immigrant boarder the family tricks into believing that the child is his.
Moe Axelrod – a racketeering friend of the family who boards with the Bergers. Moe was Hennie’s first lover, a proud war vet, Moe is bitter at the “rackets” controlling the world; he wants his own any way he can get it–and that incudes Hennie.
Uncle Morty—Bessie’s bachelor brother–middle-aged, successful, rich, smug, obnoxious. A shrewd judge of material values, the lives of others seldom touch him deeply. When he is generous, he wants others to be aware of it.
Sam Feinschreiber–Hennie’s hapless husband. A lonely man, a foreigner in a strange land, hypersensitive about this fact, and conditioned by the humiliation of not making his way alone.
Schlosser– the janitor in the Bergers’ apartment building. 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 chorus girl. The man suffers rheumatic pains. He lost his identity twenty years ago,
The world premiere of Sacco-Vanzetti by New York Playwright Bruce J. Robinson
March 30-April 15, 2017 8pm Thu, Fri, Sat
Directed by: Kelly Morgan
This world premiere show is set circa 1925, the play explores painfully relevant themes. The play examines “otherness” in America through the immigrant experience. Set in a small Massachusetts town, it revolves around Al and Teddy Capuzzi and their father, Vince – unassimilated and dedicated to fellow Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Falsely accused of murder in a robbery near Boston because of their convictions and ethnicity, they endured a seven-year ordeal that polarized the world.
Time: 1925-27.
Place: It’s largely set in a living room/kitchen in a small Massachusetts town. Lighting establishes three jail cells and a courtroom.
BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI is an Italian immigrant in his late thirties. Though not well educated, he’s clearly extremely intelligent. With equal clarity, he sees the poetry and inequities of life. Though not a master of his adopted language of English, he uses it with halting skill. This committed anarchist is willing to die to achieve equity – but clearly would rather not. He’s unmarried.
NICOLA SACCO is also an Italian immigrant and a couple of years younger than his cohort and is the more stolid of the two. His English is worse. However, he uses it expressively to describe his view of the class warfare with which he’s in a death-struggle. Fatalistic. Stubborn. Dedicated to his wife and two small children.
ALFONSO “AL” CAPUZZI ages from 12 to 14. He’s spectacularly brilliant. Without doubt, he’s the smartest kid in his mid-Massachusetts, circa 1925 school. He leavens his high principles with charm and diplomacy. His sympathy for others at this young age suggests the adult he might become. This remarkably well-read young man finds value in his father’s belief in anarchy – but also clearly values peace and pleasure. He’s a people-pleaser – and is usually a successful one.
EDUARDO “TEDDY” CAPUZZI ages from 16 to 18. He’s charming, handsome, seductive, and energetic. Although sharing his younger brother’s principles, he has a greater concern with getting rich. He seeks the spotlight – usually successfully. He battles to be considered outstanding – but simultaneously doesn’t want to stand out as being too different. He shares his fathers’ political beliefs but only as far as they don’t impinge on his material wellbeing – and he also shares his fathers’ stubborn nature.
VINCENZE “VINCE” CAPUZZI can be anywhere from late thirties to early fifties. This Italian immigrant repairs shoes to earn a living, but his passionate anarchism and his dedication to the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti are what make him live. Though he hasn’t committed any violent acts that were often connected to this movement, he certainly understands and supports such activities. This quixotic and passionate man has strong personal beliefs – possibly the strongest is that all of his beliefs are invariably correct. He’s an autocratic anarchist. He loves his two sons – but in contrasting ways. He knows that he’s different – a stranger in this new land – but it doesn’t bother him.
When: November 16th, 2016
6pm-9pm
Where: The Sprinkler Factory
38 Harlow St. Worcester MA, 01605
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Contact: shelbykolick@gmail.com with at least two preferred time slots or any questions.
Please Come With: A resume, a headshot, 1 to 2 minute prepared monologue.
Contract: AEA and Non-Equity Performers – 4th Wall has operated under a special contract with Actors’ Equity Association. If you are a Union performer, please identify your status by email or when you arrive at the audition.
Payment: Other
AEA and Non-Equity Performers – 4th Wall has operated under a special contract with Actors’ Equity Association. If you are a Union performer, please identify your status by email or when you arrive at the audition.
City or Location of call: Worcester, Massachusetts
Please submit to: shelbykolick@gmail.com by 2016-11-16
This casting notice was posted by: 4th Wall Stage Company
