Festival casting happens the Monday following auditions in a closed session with the program director, the directing students, and the festival playwrights while you are doing a post mortem on your auditions with the instructor of your Ensembles in Collaboration course.
In that other room, the first thing that happens is that without discussing it with each other, each production team goes up to a white board and writes down their ideal cast list. Then we look for areas of overlap and conflict. If no actor is wanted to be used in more than two shows, we are good to go and it was easy peasy. It almost never is easy peasy.
The next step, then, is to discuss those areas of conflict based on the specific requirements for each show. One play may need an accordion player who can speak with a good Russian accent, but another play might need that actor not for his accordion playing but because he is an excellent singer and dancer and a third play might need him because he really looks like the person the playwright imagined in her head. The teams dicker and horse trade and try to come up with some compromises that best serve the entire festival and the program.
(You can see what would happen if the only actor who could play accordion said, “I don’t want to be in that accordion play.” Disaster!)
If we can work it all out, then maybe not easy peasy, but all’s well that ends well.
If we can’t work it out, then we go into an NBA style draft with the order of the draft determined randomly and if you don’t get the actor you wanted before they are drafted by another team, tough luck, Charlie! So far, we’ve never had to go to the draft, though. We pride ourselves on being a collaborative community and not a cutthroat competitive one.
Casting notices WILL go up by NOON on that Monday, and then the lamentations and celebrations will commence.