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Director shares thoughts on the One-Acts

By Jowi Estava
Guest Columnist

I never could have imagined how exhausting auditions could be for a director until I became one myself. The original plan Katie, Sarah, Carrie and I had devised was that we were going to wear all black, sunglasses, and berets and be completely stone-faced trough the whole of the audition process to try to scare everyone auditioning as much as previous directors had.

That didn’t last long.

After about the second audition, our serious “masks” had started to fail. The berets grew itchy and our minds grew tired. We laughed at everything, even if it wasn’t funny. Eventually it was to the point where our notes about individual auditioners went from being a few lines long to a “yes” or a “hell NO.”

Finally after two days of watching actors, both mindblowingly awesome and horrendous and one long day of callbacks, we had our casts.

What was awesome about the way our cast turned out was that before callbacks a few of us were having disagreements over actors that we wanted. We were expecting there to be a big fight over who we wanted after callbacks, but I think that the fates were favoring us that day.

It all ended up working out so perfectly, during callbacks; some of us realist that actors that we had originally wanted were actually better for other people’s plays and the actors that we hadn’t even considered at auditions were perfect for some of our parts.

Everything fell into place.

And now that I have my own cast, I love them. Each and everyone of them is working so well with their character, and even though I have a huge cast that is sometimes hard to keep track of, it’s totally worth it.

I want to go into theater in college, and I think that directing this One-Act will end up being a priceless experience for me that’ll help me get farther in the world of theater. Now, if I could only get all of them to actually be a rehearsal every time…

Senior Jowi Estava is one of the four student directors of this year’s Studio One-Acts. To comment on her column go online to hilite.org.

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