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The Audition for TAKING STEPS by Alan Ayckbourn is Tuesday, May 7th from 7-10pm. If you need to be seen at a different time, please email Jennifer Vellenga- vellenga@ksu.edu.
The audition will entail a movement call of walking steps that are one level and reading sides. Sides will be posted very soon. British accents are encouraged, but not required. Acting values are more important than a perfect accent.
Roles:
4 men, 2 women (with possibility to cast a woman in the role of Leslie). Seeking a diverse cast.
Elizabeth: An attractive woman in her early thirties, an aspiring dancer, whose perception of her own abilities is inflated.
Mark: her brother, a little older, aspires to own his own fishing shop- probably a pipe dream. His fiancee, Kitty, has run away.
Tristram: Twenty-five, young, over-eager and pleasant. An young attorney (solicitor) at Speake, Tacket, and Winthrop. Though intelligent, perhaps he is not in a suitable profession.
Roland: A hard-drinking tycoon, Elizabeth’s husband, in his forties, very wealthy, in the process of buying the Victorian home that he and Elizabeth currently rent/lease.
Leslie (male/female): A developer/builder, a perky little person, late thirties, clad in full motorcycle gear, surveying the Victorian home for renovations.
Kitty: mousy, a rather cumbersome girl in her late twenties, docile. Gets trapped in an attic closet for much of the play
SYNOPSIS:
Roland, a hard drinking tycoon, is considering buying an old Victorian house, once a brothel. His solicitor and the vendor, a builder, arrive to complete the deal. Also in the house are his wife, a frustrated dancer who is always considering leaving him, her brother and later the brother’s fiancee, who is uncertain whether or not to run away. In the course of one hectic night and morning, with continual running up and downstairs and in and out of rooms, these characters, each immersed in a personal problem, try to sort themselves out. The first act curtain finds the solicitor in bed with the wife thinking her to be a ghost and the fiancee inadvertently shut in the attic cupboard by the distraught tycoon who has taken refuge there in the spare bed. All this takes place in a highly ingenious and original setting in which all the rooms, passages and stairs are on a single level.
Alan Ayckbourn has spent his life in theatre, rarely if ever tempted by television or film, which perhaps explains why he continues to be so prolific. To date he has written 77 plays, and his work has been translated into over 35 languages, is performed on stage and television throughout the world, and has won countless awards. Major successes include: Relatively Speaking, How the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, A Chorus of Disapproval and The Norman Conquests. The National Theatre recently revived his 1980 play Season’s Greetings to great acclaim and the past year alone has seen West End productions of Absent Friends and A Chorus Of Disapproval. In 2009, he retired as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph, where almost all his plays have been and continue to be first staged. Holding the post for 37 years, he still feels that perhaps his greatest achievement was the establishment of this company’s first permanent home when the two auditoria complex fashioned from a former Odeon Cinema opened in 1996. In recent years, he has been inducted into American Theatre’s Hall of Fame, received the 2010 Critics’ Circle Award for Services to the Arts and became the first British playwright to receive both Olivier and Tony Special Lifetime Achievement Awards. He was knighted in 1997 for services to the theatre.
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