Edward Albee's
Three Tall Women
Performances May 16-25, 2002
Bios: Bob
Susan Sabra
Kris John
Patrick Linda
Jim
The Crew Our Corporate Sponsors
About the Auditions
Director's Note
In THREE TALL WOMEN Edward Albee has once again shown serious theatre goers the reason he is among the top living dramatists in the English language. Through the story of the life of one woman the audience is reminded of all the strengths, weaknesses, prejudices, loves and joys of being human. Albee uses a single set and four characters to explore the stages of life from the perspective of an elderly woman who is close to death. He balances adeptly on the edge of the absurd in order to explore realistically and frankly everything from incontinence to infidelity, from raising children to the compromises made and the regrets gathered. Definitely an actor's piece of playwriting, THREE TALL WOMEN will surely demonstrate the degree of talent to be found in our local theatre community.
Bios
Bob Vance (Director)
last directed Beyond
Therapy for LTCT. He has acted in a wide
variety of roles over the past thirty years including Charlie Cotchipee in the
musical P, Frederick Treves in The Elephant Man, and
Abe Burrows in Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, all with the Robeson
Players in Grand Rapids. He has acted in several rolls with LTCT including
Waldo Lydecker in Laura. More recently he has been active with Petoskey
Theatre Festival productions including Phil Gorsky in PTFs premier show Greetings,
Charles the Wrestler and Jacques in last summers As You Like It,
and Dean Strauss in Spinning Into Butter. Children are still
frightened by him due to his portrayal of the Wolf in Grimms Tales.
Bob is a widely published poet and writer who recently was nominated for a
Pushcart award and has had pieces in magazines and journals in the US, Canada
and the U.K. His long poem, THE WORLD TREE, published in fine art book
form with original intaglio prints by Chad Pastotnik, has been included in
University of Michigan's Hatcher Library collection. He works as a Family
Counselor with Hospice of Little Traverse Bay. top
Susan
Pearl (A) has been involved in theatre
since her first stage appearance in kindergarten at Charlevoix Schools.
Since then, she has worked in every aspect of theatre production,
including teaching drama for ten years in Grand Rapids Public Schools.
She has worked with a diverse group of theaters, most notably Robeson
Players of Grand Rapids and Petoskey Theatre Festival here in Petoskey.
Her favorite roles are just as diverse; Constance in Madwoman
of Chaillot, Lola in Come Back, Little Sheba, Arlene in Getting
Out, Emily in Greetings, Adam in As
You Like It, and Catherine Kenney in Spinning
Into Butter. She would like to
thank Terry McCarthy and Larry Green of Petoskey Theatre Festival for rekindling
and re-teaching her the love and art of theatre.
Susan has a Masters Degree in Education and teaches part time at Alba
Public Schools, as well as, working part time at The Grain Train as a
bookkeeper. In her spare time
(???), she likes to travel, camp and create unusual hats.
Sabra Hayden
(B) Sabra began acting with Little Traverse
Civic Theatre almost ten years ago when she was cast as Aunt Blanche in Neil
Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs and she has also been seen in many
productions including the most memorable roles (and her favorites) of Mona in Come
Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Mrs. Kendal in The
Elephant Man. Sabra also made her directorial debut with LTCT two years ago
with A Summer with Hemingway's Twin. When she's not onstage she has
worked backstage in just about every aspect of theatre. Sabra currently
serves as Vice President and Treasurer of the LTCT Board of Directors and as
co-chair of the Charlevoix-Emmet Cultural Plan Steering Committee.
She wishes to thank her husband, Darryl, and children, Sam and Maggie for their
overwhelming support of her "hobby" and Jan Joslin for her help,
support and friendship (always, but most especially with this production).
Sabra dedicates this performance to her mother, Ruby, and grandmother, Lois, two
tall women who greatly influenced her life. top
Kristin
Story (C) moved to Petoskey from
Northern California three years ago. She
played Rosalind in Petoskey Theatre Festival’s production of As
You Like It. She works as a
musician, solo and with her partner in life Jim Owen.
John Bartha
(The Boy) "This is my sixth play in Petoskey, two in Petoskey Middle
School and three with LTCT. I was in Robin Hood and
Rude Awakenings in middle school. The LTCT plays I was in were: The
Elephant Man, A Summer With Hemmingway's Twin, and Much Ado About Nothing.
They were all fun and I am enjoying this show. Take it easy, John."
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Patrick Richmond (Producer)
has been involved in various aspects of the theatre both backstage and on the
stage. His most recent involvement was co-directing LTCT's Wife Begins
At Forty last fall. Pat is currently an LTCT Board member.
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Linda Truax (Production
Stage
Manager) is currently
the Production Stage Manager for Petoskey Theatre Festival where she has stage
managed their first full season (5 productions), and took a turn on the boards
performing several roles in Grimm Tales. Before joining PTF, Linda was living in
New York City, where she worked as a studio/props coordinator for Production
Design Group - the Emmy Award winning firm responsible for the set design of NBC
Nightly News, Dateline, MSNBC, A & E Biography, The History Channel and The
National Geographic Channel and many others. While in New York, Linda
worked as a stage manager and production assistant at The Juilliard School, as
well as freelancing as a prop and set designer for various video productions.
She is a graduate of the Specs Howard School of Broadcast Arts, and has been a director and producer for public access television. This is her first time
working with Little Traverse Civic Theatre. top
Jim Owen (Sound Design
and Original Music) Beginning
with Sylvia, in the Spring of 1999, Jim Owen has been involved, in some
capacity, with nearly every Civic Theatre production over the past three
years. Meanwhile, he has remained an active performer and music
instructor, and has served as Music Director for the Little Traverse Choral
Society and First Presbyterian Church, whose Chancel Choir has presented several
of his sacred choral compositions as part of worship services. For Three
Tall Women, Jim has expanded the definition of "sound design" to
include the creation of original incidental and underscore music that
(hopefully!) supports and enhances the emotional underpinning's of Albee's very
musical text and this cast's finely tuned performances.
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The Crew
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What a director hopes to find, through the audition process, is the right combination of people. People who will give in to a process that the play demands in order to be made live, to the director, to the actors, and most important, to the audience. The directors job then, in putting an audition process together, is to make it a vehicle in which those who audition will be able to show how they can, or cannot, work in a group to allow the play as literature to become the play as living, breathing, growing and transforming theatre. This is particularly important in a play like Three Tall Women.
I have always been concerned about auditions that involve only reading pieces of the script, sans movement, sans eye contact, sans developing a sense of real interaction with all of its potential flukes, surprises and sub textual richness that makes a piece of theatre come alive.
Three Tall Women is a play full of all of the things that are absent from a normal audition. It is a play full of flukes, surprises, eye play especially having to do with the differences between what each of the characters sees, and tons of subtext. And it is full of words. A very talky play. I know I need actors who can manage the script, that is sure, but that would be the easy part: All an actor in the play would have to do is an acceptable job of the monkey work of memorization and the words would be there. Edward Albee, the playwright, won a Pulitzer Prize with these words. We needn’t do much with them aside from say them. But just making sure the words are there is another way to kill a play on stage, especially a wordy play. So I set out to try to make an audition process that would give me an idea of what my actors might be able to do in addition to memorizing the words: How and when would they move? How do they use their bodies to show surprises in the script? What would they do with the physical objects, including the other actors, on the set? How would they use the things around them to make the play come alive? How would they respond to the unexpected and make the script new every night, even to themselves?
I thought it might be best to avoid the script as much as possible. And I certainly didn't want a bunch of people coming in who had read the script and had developed their own ideas about the characters. The whole idea of performance is to allow the characters to grow and BECOME through the rehearsal and performance process in relationship to things that can not be known at the time of the auditions. So, to that end, I will remain firmly in control and STINGY with the scripts.
Oh... and those who come to auditions should be prepared to have fun, and show that they can have fun even when seriously involved in the process of building what is called, after all, a PLAY. Bob Vance. top
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
According to the dictionary the word cachexia means a general condition of weakness and emaciation due to a serious chronic disease. One of the characters in Three Tall Women has a line that epitomizes how the word cachexia can be applied, not only in the life of the main character of the play, but perhaps the life of any woman, or any man. The character states: 'Starving people absorb their own bodies.'
So why is that? Why exactly must we, particularly at the end of our lives, starve? Cachexia is an expected occurrence in anyone with a terminal disease. But is it just the body, the flesh, that feeds on itself? What about the sense of who we are, what we have done, who we have loved and where we have been? What is left of us, in the end, when, as the plays character says, 'All the glitter is gone'? Must we feed upon those things in only the terms of what has passed in order to finish our lives?
Whew. Heavy questions eh?
But they are the questions that Three Tall Women poses. They are not easy questions, and there are certainly no easy answers. They are the reason that, since I first saw Three Tall Women in London, with Maggie Smith in the lead role, that I have wanted to be a part of the play in some way. I believe acting in, or directing a play is perhaps the best, most complete, way of learning the plays lessons... and of fully realizing the questions it poses.
Some people consistently voice doubts about whether audiences can appreciate truly transformational, real to life theatre that poses such difficult questions. To me there really is no other kind of theatre. I thrive on it. But I am a happy person overall, and I think there is a great possibility that only happy people can really dive into such questioning without fear of drowning, of a kind of premature cachexia, so to speak.
So dive in. Three Tall Women is, after all, about all of our lives. Why should we be afraid to look at them? top