Kimberly Ryan Acting Studio

EXPECTATION
written/performed by Alan Fox &
developed/directed by Kimberly Ryan

Tickets for 7pm show - https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/9936382
Tickets for 9:30pm show - https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/9936819

$20 general admission
$12 ticket for artist/under 30
$10 student

WHEN: Monday, July 21st at 7pm and 9:30pm. Running time 75 mins.
WHERE: Cherry Lane Studio Theater. 38 Commerce St, New York, NY 10014
WHAT: EXPECTATION is a one person show that mixes comedy and drama in the form of six young Americans, all trying to make sense of the gap between a fantasy that was promised and a reality that was found.

Over the past few months of development EXPECTATION has been a...

- Winner of the Manhattan Rep's Winter One Act Festival (Dak in DEAR MR. PRESIDENT)
- Selection for the United Solo Festival
- Selection for the Tongues Summer Reading Series at the Cherry Lane

"Rarely do you see a show that makes you see yourself in an unflattering light and still believe you have the power to change the world. And I'm still laughing." - Jennifer Kaplan

"I nearly fell out of my seat." - Lucius DeCarlo, age 17

"Alan is spectacular in his debut as a writer and performer of EXPECTATION. He's created a range of entertaining, multi-faceted, rich characters." - Kathleen Lingo

Casting Director RISA BRAMON GARCIA in BACKSTAGE on 21 CHOICES to make for a great audition.

"Casting directors are your advocates and your champions. Your work reflects on us. Your wonderful work makes us look good and gets that role cast. Your disconnected, tentative, muddled work does nothing for anyone. We need you to be great. We’re here to host your experience and shepherd you in, not hold you back. We want to share in your excellent work.

..this is your time, your experience. This is your opportunity to do exceptional work. Enter the space and do the work for yourself, for the gratification of the work itself, and yes, to collaborate with the other creative people waiting to figure it out with you. They can’t do it without you.

..Remember that we’re all human in those rooms, and you can affect us on an emotional level. It’s what we all really want. That’s your job. You being fully present, truthful, personal, and vulnerable is going to give us the ammunition we need to champion you with all our hearts. We all desperately want you to do great work. We’re rooting for that every time you walk into the room. You show up and do your fullest, deepest work, and we’ll slay dragons for you and follow you anywhere. And man, we’ll be so happy doing it. You have the power to make that happen. For you. For us. For the work. Hallelujah!

1. Accept the invitation with grace and enthusiasm. You were requested to be here as our guest.

2. Come to work and not to please or get our approval.

3. Enter with certainty. Don’t give up your power as soon as the door opens.

4. Play on a level playing field. We’re all figuring it out. Together.

5. Make no excuses whatsoever. Leave your baggage outside. Better yet, at home.

6. Make the room your own. It will make us so much more comfortable.

7. Ask questions only when you truly need answers. “Do you have any questions?” is usually another way of saying: “Are you ready?” You aren’t required to have one.

8. Know your words and understand what you’re talking about. You don’t have to be totally off-book, but if you’ve spent quality time with the material, you’re going to know it.

9. Do your homework on the project. This includes knowing all the players and the show or film’s tone and style. Read all the material you can get your hands on.

10. Make choices and take responsibility for the choices you make.

11. Don’t apologize. Ever. For anything.

12. Know what you want to do and do it. Then leave yourself available to make discoveries. Know that your homework is done. Now let your preparation meet the moments.

13. Don’t mime or busy yourself with props, activity, or blocking. Keep it simple.

14. Don’t expect to be directed, but if you are, take the direction, no matter what it is. Understand how to translate results-oriented direction into action.

15. Don’t blame the reader. Make the reader the star of your audition. According to my teaching partner Steve Braun, you should engage fully no matter who’s reading those lines. Likely your reader will engage – at least somewhat – if you show up.

16. Make specific, personal, bold choices. We want your unique voice to bring the script to life.

17. Stillness is powerful. Understand how to move and work in front of the camera – eliminate running in and out and getting up and down.

18. Require no stroking, coddling, or love. We’re there to work. Don’t take it personally when we’re not touchy-feely. Know that we love actors and that’s truly why we’re here.

19. Understand that you’re there to collaborate. You’re being evaluated in terms of how you serve the role and the material. It's not a verdict on your personhood. Judgment is something you can control.

20. What you bring in reflects how you’re received so bring in joy, conviction, and ease, and our hearts will open.

21. Share your artistry above all else.

21 Things That Make Casting Directors Happy in the Audition Room Casting directors are your advocates and your champions. Your work reflects on us. Your wonderful work makes us look good and gets that role cast. Your disconnected, tentative, muddled work does nothing for anyone. We need you to be great.

A Letter from David Mamet to the Writers of The Unit
Posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 by David Chen

I was having a pretty uneventful day at the office until I saw this post about a memo written by writer/director David Mamet crop up on my Twitter feed. It’s a note that Mamet addressed to the writing staff of the now-canceled CBS show The Unit, in which he lays out some guiding principles for compelling television. According to Movieline, the memo first surfaced recently at Ink Canada.

When I saw that the memo contained nuggets of wisdom such as “ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF S**T,” and “IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT *WILL* BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE,” I knew the whole thing would be a must-read. Mamet also takes time to lay into TV executives, which he refers to as “penguins.” Overall, it offers some amusing and piercing insights into what makes good writing and storytelling. I’m left wondering though: Does Mamet’s work always live up to his high standards? Hit the jump for the full memo, and savor the intensity (capital letters are from the original).

TO THE WRITERS OF THE UNIT

GREETINGS.

AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN *DRAMA* AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.

EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A S**TLOAD OF *INFORMATION* INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.

OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE *INFORMATION* — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.

BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, *ACUTE* GOAL.

SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES *OF EVERY SCENE* THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.

IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.

THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. *YOU* THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE *EVERY* SCENE IS DRAMATIC.

THIS MEANS ALL THE “LITTLE” EXPOSITIONAL SCENES OF TWO PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD. THIS BUSHWAH (AND WE ALL TEND TO WRITE IT ON THE FIRST DRAFT) IS LESS THAN USELESS, SHOULD IT FINALLY, GOD FORBID, GET FILMED.

IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT *WILL* BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.

SOMEONE HAS TO MAKE THE SCENE DRAMATIC. IT IS NOT THE ACTORS JOB (THE ACTORS JOB IS TO BE TRUTHFUL). IT IS NOT THE DIRECTORS JOB. HIS OR HER JOB IS TO FILM IT STRAIGHTFORWARDLY AND REMIND THE ACTORS TO TALK FAST. IT IS *YOUR* JOB.

EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.


THIS NEED IS WHY THEY *CAME*. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET *WILL* LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO *FAILURE* – THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS *OVER*. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE *NEXT* SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE *PLOT*.

ANY SCENE, THUS, WHICH DOES NOT BOTH ADVANCE THE PLOT, AND STANDALONE (THAT IS, DRAMATICALLY, BY ITSELF, ON ITS OWN MERITS) IS EITHER SUPERFLUOUS, OR INCORRECTLY WRITTEN.

YES BUT YES BUT YES BUT, YOU SAY: WHAT ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF WRITING IN ALL THAT “INFORMATION?”

AND I RESPOND “*FIGURE IT OUT*” ANY DI****AD WITH A BLUESUIT CAN BE (AND IS) TAUGHT TO SAY “MAKE IT CLEARER”, AND “I WANT TO KNOW MORE *ABOUT* HIM”.

WHEN YOU’VE MADE IT SO CLEAR THAT EVEN THIS BLUESUITED PENGUIN IS HAPPY, BOTH YOU AND HE OR SHE *WILL* BE OUT OF A JOB.

THE JOB OF THE DRAMATIST IS TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE WONDER WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. *NOT* TO EXPLAIN TO THEM WHAT JUST HAPPENED, OR TO*SUGGEST* TO THEM WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

ANY DI****AD, AS ABOVE, CAN WRITE, “BUT, JIM, IF WE DON’T ASSASSINATE THE PRIME MINISTER IN THE NEXT SCENE, ALL EUROPE WILL BE ENGULFED IN FLAME”

WE ARE NOT GETTING PAID TO *REALIZE* THAT THE AUDIENCE NEEDS THIS INFORMATION TO UNDERSTAND THE NEXT SCENE, BUT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO WRITE THE SCENE BEFORE US SUCH THAT THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INTERESTED IN WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

YES BUT, YES BUT YES *BUT* YOU REITERATE.

AND I RESPOND *FIGURE IT OUT*.

*HOW* DOES ONE STRIKE THE BALANCE BETWEEN WITHHOLDING AND VOUCHSAFING INFORMATION? *THAT* IS THE ESSENTIAL TASK OF THE DRAMATIST. AND THE ABILITY TO *DO* THAT IS WHAT SEPARATES YOU FROM THE LESSER SPECIES IN THEIR BLUE SUITS.

FIGURE IT OUT.

START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE *SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC*. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS.

LOOK AT YOUR LOG LINES. ANY LOGLINE READING “BOB AND SUE DISCUSS…” IS NOT DESCRIBING A DRAMATIC SCENE.

PLEASE NOTE THAT OUR OUTLINES ARE, GENERALLY, SPECTACULAR. THE DRAMA FLOWS OUT BETWEEN THE OUTLINE AND THE FIRST DRAFT.

THINK LIKE A FILMMAKER RATHER THAN A FUNCTIONARY, BECAUSE, IN TRUTH, *YOU* ARE MAKING THE FILM. WHAT YOU WRITE, THEY WILL SHOOT.

HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF S**T.

ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF S**T.

DO *NOT* WRITE A CROCK OF S**T. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR *AND* HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.

REMEMBER YOU ARE WRITING FOR A VISUAL MEDIUM. *MOST* TELEVISION WRITING, OURS INCLUDED, SOUNDS LIKE *RADIO*. THE *CAMERA* CAN DO THE EXPLAINING FOR YOU. *LET* IT. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS *DOING* -*LITERALLY*. WHAT ARE THEY HANDLING, WHAT ARE THEY READING. WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING ON TELEVISION, WHAT ARE THEY *SEEING*.

IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

IF YOU DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF THE CRUTCH OF NARRATION, EXPOSITION,INDEED, OF *SPEECH*. YOU WILL BE FORGED TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM – TELLING THE STORY IN PICTURES (ALSO KNOWN AS SCREENWRITING)

THIS IS A NEW SKILL. NO ONE DOES IT NATURALLY. YOU CAN TRAIN YOURSELVES TO DO IT, BUT YOU NEED TO *START*.

I CLOSE WITH THE ONE THOUGHT: LOOK AT THE *SCENE* AND ASK YOURSELF “IS IT DRAMATIC? IS IT *ESSENTIAL*? DOES IT ADVANCE THE PLOT?

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY.

IF THE ANSWER IS “NO” WRITE IT AGAIN OR THROW IT OUT. IF YOU’VE GOT ANY QUESTIONS, CALL ME UP.

LOVE, DAVE MAMET
SANTA MONICA 19 OCTO 05

(IT IS *NOT* YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW THE ANSWERS, BUT IT IS YOUR, AND MY, RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW AND TO *ASK THE RIGHT Questions* OVER AND OVER. UNTIL IT BECOMES SECOND NATURE. I BELIEVE THEY ARE LISTED ABOVE.)

Class is on tonight Tuesday at 6pm.
Looking forward to seeing everyone.
I suggest bringing a script to read to your polling place & have a wonderful time voting.

Due to recovery from SANDY, Studio Classes for today are cancelled. Classes resume Tuesday, November 6th, Election Day at 6pm. Please contact Studio Phone with any questions: 212-580-5552. Please stay safe as we help our neighbors!

ACTING STUDIO classes will resume Thursday, November 1st. Hope everyone is safe and protected. Any questions please call studio number: 212-580-5552. Thank you.

Here is the link to the audio interview!


http://www.everythingactingpodcast.com/_podcasts/EA_142.mp3

EA 142

Uncle Vanya's Tribeca Country House

Sam Gold and Annie Baker team up to stage an intimate Chekhov

By Jacob Gallagher-Ross Wednesday, Jun 20 2012 VILLAGE VOICE
Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya—perhaps his harshest play—is a study in claustrophobia. Its enclosed spaces are literal: Bottled up in an isolated country house, its characters chafe against each other until tempers fray, repressed feelings spill free, and uncomfortable realizations loom unavoidably. But the confinement is also existential. It’s not just the dacha that hems them in: Their lives are the closest kind of captivity of all—time, too, is a merciless prison.

Julieta Cervantes
Maria Dizzia and Michael Shannon
In the play, the arrival of a vain professor (Peter Friedman)—here, called just the Professor—and his sexy, bored wife, Yelena (Maria Dizzia), disrupts the operation of the Russian estate whose income has sustained him through a life of derivative pedantry. With its routines off-kilter, the country people—especially the professor’s daughter Sonya (Merritt Wever) and her uncle Vanya (Reed Birney), the estate’s hardworking managers—are left to fill the unfamiliar spare time with self-examination and amorous aspirations. Remorseful mnemonic voyages through wasted opportunities, and seething unreciprocated desires, soon put the household, and their psyches, on the boil.

Sam Gold’s devastatingly beautiful new Soho Rep production—Annie Baker adapted the original script—puts us in the house with them, breathing the same air thick with disappointment, fatigue, and fragile, desperate hope. Under steeply angled plywood rafters, in a room halfway between a barn and your grandma’s living room, we sit crosslegged and jammed together on carpeted steps that run around the theater on three sides. Like Chekhov’s fed-up people, we’re never more than a room’s length from anybody—or their problems. We’re as hemmed-in as they are. While they fret, fume, desire, jibe, and despair, we’re always over their shoulders and sometimes even inside their heads—in this intimate room, monologues become charged confessional episodes.

Chekhov’s self-scrutinizing characters are always watching themselves live life, both performers and ironic critics of their own dramas. Even while they feel the pangs of some desperate, private emotion, they’re also hunting up parallels from literature or theater, ruefully aware that no human thought or feeling is truly original. The heightened theatricality of Gold’s staging—we watch our fellow spectators watch, and see ourselves seeing—makes the characters seem even more painfully conscious of their own melodramatic urgencies.

More than most theater, this is time explicitly spent together. And, as we all know, in a Chekhov play spending time is a serious business—as characters lament their lost youth, rage against the narrowing limits of their lives, or yearn at utopian futures, we’re made acutely mindful of dwindling seconds, minutes, hours. We’re growing irrevocably older, and closer to our own hard life reckonings as we sit there. Performed in modern dress—the costumes are so apt it’s as if the characters themselves picked them—the production puts the 19th and 21st centuries into stereoscopic overlap. When characters fervently dream of a better future redeemed by their unrewarded toil, we’re forced to confront the bitter fact that it may not have arrived.

The close proximity allows the company to act with a gorgeous conversational naturalism, as subtly modulated as film acting, but more vibrant for being spoken directly to us, and each other, in time with the play’s mercurial shifts of mood. Since we’re all in the room together, the performers can throw lines away as they walk out, or holler from the wings. Gold stages eloquent flourishes in the margins—as servants drift in and out, we’re alert to the subtle workings of the estate, the apparatus that supports these listless lives. We forget about someone sitting quietly in the corner until they chime in once again.

Baker’s adaptation is utterly faithful to the play’s clear-eyed spirit, rendering its hard truths in plainspoken prose that sometimes approaches an almost Beckett-like starkness—while remaining truthful to Chekhov’s uncanny transcription of sputtering consciousness. She preserves enough strangeness—Russian songs, places, names—to remind us of the play’s origins, while unostentatiously making the language sound completely contemporary. She merges the offhand casualness and ironic detachment of downtown theater with the sudden emotional swerves, dives, and flights of Chekhov’s mobile temperaments. This pays off in many places, but I’ve never heard Doctor Astrov’s helpless lament for humanity’s ecocidal tendencies more clearly or more urgently. I think it’s the best version for American ears and tongues since Paul Schmidt’s.

This is ensemble acting of a caliber we don’t often see. Birney’s mordant, acid Vanya; Wever’s sweet, suffering, utterly unsentimental Sonya; Michael Shannon’s obsessive, exhausted, ironically self-loathing Astrov; Dizzia’s charming, arrogant Yelena—each renews a familiar character, while also precisely aligning them with 21st-century types. We all know people like this. (Friedman nails the persona so perfectly, his professor could have taken the train down from Columbia before the show.)

For Chekhov’s people, the only form of salvation from time’s remorseless advance is scrupulous attention to everyday tasks—keeping accounts, making sure others are fed and comforted, sustaining life in small ways. For this production, too, grace is in the details: Vanya vehemently chomping a pickle while excoriating his own failure with perverse glee; the almost Caravaggio-like modulation of light and shadow; how the stage is voided in the tumultuous third act to match the environmental blight mapped on Astrov’s charts.

Go see it. People are going to be talking about this one for years.

go DAME JUDI DENCH!

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