Recent arts coverage:
- Evolutionary biology. Aesthetic determinism. Live action role playing. The Rude Mechs are making a new play again
- Suburban battlefield: Women fight invisible foe in Amie Siegel’s ‘Black Moon’
- In eerie paintings by Ana Fernandez, a house isn’t just a house
More arts coverage | Follow this blog on Twitter @artsinaustin | Read recent arts reviews
Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > August > 17
Monday, August 17, 2009
ACoT Announces 2009 Unified General Auditions
The Austin Circle of Theater is holding Unified General Auditions on Aug. 29. See www.acotonline.org for complete information.
From the ACOT notice:
Austin Circle of Theaters presents their 2009 Unified General Auditions, an annual audition to benefit the Texas acting community and help actors find work, directors find actors, and casting people discover new emerging talent. ACOT will be hosting this year’s event in association with University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film, Central Texas Alliance of Casting Agents, Directors and Coaches and the Salvage Vanguard Theater.
Contenders must first apply to audition and then the selected applicants may perform either a one minute monologue and/or 16 bars of a song for the panel. Applications will be evaluated by a screening panel composed of Austin casting and theater directors.
Also in attendance at this year’s Unified General Auditions will be Central Texas’ top producers, directors, and casting agents.
ACoT’s Unified General Auditions serve professional, working actors in Texas. They are open to all actors, union and non-union, local and regional.
Fees: $10 for Current ACOT members, $36 for non-members, $46 to join ACOT (or renew).
All applicants must meet at least one of the following criteria:
- Be an Actors’ Equity Association Member or Candidate
- Have accumulated the equivalent of one year’s acting training
- Have performed in at least two non-school, non-university/college, public stage productions
To participate in ACoT’s 2009 Unified General Auditions, actors must:
- Submit completed application by Monday, August 24 at 5 p.m.
- The ACOT office must receive 50 résumés with standard 8” x 10” headshots attached from each actor no later than Thursday, August 27.
- Auditions will be on Saturday, August 29 and are by appointment only at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. Actors must call the ACOT office at 512.247.2531 or email membership@acotonline.org to make an appointment.
- Qualified applicants will be notified whether or not they have received an audition slot. In the event that the number of applications exceeds the number of audition slots available, preference will be given to the application that was received first.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: Theatre
Review: ‘The Last Hippie’
The hippies hanging out at the Dairy Queen only look cool as long as you don’t talk to them. This is not the moral of Vincent Mann’s solo show, “The Last Hippie: A Western Novel,” but it could have been.
The play, at the Vortex through August 22, follows Mann’s bonding with San Antonio Dairy Queen hippies in 1974 rather than, as Mann seems to wish, a hippy fairy tale set in San Francisco in 1964. Mann never quite indicts the decade-late hippies he grew up with in San Antonio for being shallow. Instead, his mix of anecdotes of drug use and philosophizing clings to the past, but never offers much reason to rehearse the period.
Perhaps this stems from Mann’s philosophy of art. In a didactic epilogue, Mann tells his audience to avoid “looking for answers in art.” It is odd to receive such an instruction after sitting through a two-hour play focused on one man’s search for answers.
Directed by Pam Ramirez, Mann wanders around the stage, sometimes making creative use of props: an old bench transforms from teenage bed for drug-induced dreaming to a coffin for a drug-overdosed teen.
The show has a few gems of scenes. Mann’s description of his Colorado Springs country band becoming soundtrack to a bar fight paints a funny picture. Mann’s first experience getting high — he stage light actually brightens the first time he says “pot” — has rich details, too. He recalls sitting in a church pew, noticing the elder deacon next to him reeks of ham, an unfortunate coincidence for a fourteen-year-old churchgoer with raging munchies. But in many spots the play’s language is thin, overly generalized and tries far too hard to wring meaning from music lyrics.
Knowing laughter from pockets of the audience suggested the nostalgic trip might have more meaning for those who shared 1974 with Mann. But one audience member offered another telling response, pulling out his fingernail clippers during the play’s second half and clipping his nails through the remaining monologues.
‘The Last Hippie’ continues through Aug. 22 at the Vortex. See www.vortexrep.org. Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance arts critic.
