THEATREOFDARE

This classic of the American theater explores alternatives that spring from the demented terrain of the California landscape.

 

This darkly comic drama revolves around the volatile relationship between two brothers, Lee and Austin, as they navigate their contrasting lifestyles and aspirations while staying in their mother's house. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale.

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AUDITION INFORMATION:

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Auditions will be held January 30 & 31 at the theater in Kitty Hawk beginning at 7 p.m. We will be reading from the selections posted below, and possibly from other scenes in the play. We will be reading the scenes with Austin/Lee/Mom first, then Austin/Lee/Saul, and then delving into the scenes between the two brothers.

 

(Director’s note for those auditioning for Austin and Lee: If there’s a fellow actor you’ve always wanted to work with, and you want to be auditioned together, please denote that on your audition forms, and We’ll be sure to let you read together during auditions. We can’t guarantee you’ll be cast together, but we want to give people the opportunity to audition with someone they feel they work well with.)

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REHEARSAL SCHEDULE:

 

Rehearsals will be held Mondays - Thursdays from 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. The actors playing Austin and Lee can expect to be called for nearly every rehearsal, while the actors playing Saul and Mom will likely be called only once or twice a week until tech week, which is March 16-19.

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ROLES AVAILABLE: 

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AUSTIN: Male, Late 20s - Early 40s. A squeaky-clean Ivy League graduate who works as a screenwriter. Austin has a wife and children in Northern California but is working at his mother's house in Southern California while she is away in Alaska. Conventionally educated at an Ivy League college, Austin inhabits a neat world constructed of middle-class values of rationality, self-discipline, and hard work. By all accounts, he is a success.

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LEE: Male, Early 30s - Late 40s. Austin's brother. Lee is a beer-swilling desert rat and petty thief who has come to their mother's house to loot the neighbors of household appliances. He is the exact opposite of his brother in looks, sensibility, and degree of success. He is not without insight, and he possesses an imagination unfettered by education, but he lacks discipline and cannot tolerate frustration. What he wants he takes, whether it be a neighbor's television set, Austin's car, or, ultimately, Austin's work.

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SAUL KIMMER: Male, Early 40s - Late 50s. A slick Hollywood producer. He is as sincere as anyone who is motivated only by profit can be. Shallow and superficial, dressed in loud flowered shirts and polyester pants, he is a caricature of the Hollywood parasite who, lacking talent himself, survives by marketing the talents of others.

MOM: Female, Early 60s - Late 70s. An absurdist vision of a powerless mother. Mom is characterized by Lee as not liking “even a single tea leaf in her sink,” but she is strangely indifferent to the destruction of her home and plants when she returns suddenly in the last scene from her vacation in Alaska. More concerned about what she has interpreted as a visit of Picasso to the local museum than about the primal contest occurring before her eyes, she seems unable to grasp the fact that Picasso is dead, and she is blind to her sons' hatred, thus displaying an inability to distinguish life from art.

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INTIMACY NOTES:
 

This show contains moments of verbal and physical altercations. Each physical fight between the brothers escalates as the play progresses. Austin at one point chokes Lee with a telephone cord while their mom watches. There are also a few moments when sexual / crude gestures are made.