The Grand Illusion Theatre invites actors to a read-through

By Ethan Nahté

The Grand Illusion Theatre finished up their first month-long acting workshop on Saturday. Owners Lou and Denni Longoria considered it successful overall. Although some participants could not attend every class, the workshop appeared to average 24 participants.

Tim Hesse, one of the four acting workshop facilitators said, “We had a core group of about eight people who were consistently there.”

Most of the attendees had no previous acting experience, while a few had a minute amount of experience.

“A couple of them are in a play at the OLT and that’s their first play,” Hesse said. “I’m glad we got them up here, too. A lot of them said the same thing, ‘I’ve been around it all my life. I’ve been interested in it all of my life.’ I’m glad they decided to do something.

“I think it was a success. Obviously, we didn’t find any Marlon Brandos in the bunch. We got people who were genuinely interested and did the work that they needed to do. Some people put in more work than the others. Some people had it memorized,” Hesse said, referring to the scene performances from well-known plays such as “Steel Magnolias” that the actors performed onstage in front of their peers.

The group and the facilitators then critiqued each performance after they finished, explaining what they liked, how it made them feel, or if there were things that needed work.

“All of these different scenes, we had facilitators working with them,” Hesse said.

The Longorias are hoping to continue doing something monthly with the acting workshops. The next project on their list is a read-through for the play “Al Capone’s Bird” they are considering performing at The Grand Illusion Theatre, which has a cast of eight characters.

Hesse said, “Al Capone’s Bird is a plane. The story of the play is that it takes place out in the mountains of California that at one point the plane went down in these remote mountains. It was kind of like D.B. Cooper… it was a legend that nobody knew if it was re- story.”

There will be a read-through of the play, and it is not limited to the participants of the acting workshop.

“A read-through is basically just the script,” Hesse said. “You start on the first page. Somebody is usually ap- also getting an idea of who we’d like to be in it. Maybe a week later, if we decide on this play, we could have auditions. We probably don’t want to do this play before Christmas because there is lots of stuff coming up and the OLT has got a thing coming up, too. We’ll probably actually do it next year, so we’ll probably have auditions next year.”

“Anybody from the community, or from this group we just had, can jump in and read a character. We’ll probably switch off and you’ll get to read for a few pages then we’ll switch to somebody else. They’ll probably steal from you. If you did a Brooklyn accent, they’ll probably try a Brooklyn accent. By the end of it, hopefully we can find all of the characters.” ally out there, but supposedly it had all his money — his loose cash — inside this plane. Anybody who finds the plane would be rich. All these people for all of these years have been looking for Al Capone’s Bird.

“In this play, supposedly one of the characters finds it, then he gets killed. It’s kind of a murder mystery but it’s more about the characters than really the mystery of the murder.

“We’re going to switch it so it’s in the Arkansas mountains because Al Capone was big out in Hot Springs — he started the racetrack and the hotel there. We’re going to switch it so it’s local so it seems more appropriate to the [local] people.

“One character is a gangster, one is a policewoman pretending to be somebody else — everybody is kind of pretending to be somebody else — you’ve got one of the twins pretending to be the other guy. It’s an interesting pointed to read all of the stage directions, so you understand the locations and what’s happening. Then everybody else picks a character and you read the character. You get to hear the characters in different voices and for the first time, they start to make sense. You can delineate between who’s talking.”

“We’re kind of auditioning the play itself, because we’ve each read it. To me the play really doesn’t make sense, or you don’t know if this is a good play until you have a read-through. If you’re sitting around and somebody is doing a funny accent and there are funny lines and if we’re all laughing, then maybe the audience will like this play, too. If during the read-through, nobody is laughing; nobody is reacting to this play, you go ‘Maybe this isn’t a good play.’

Hesse, who said he will also be probably directing the play, said, “We’re

Hesse said, “The board room holds 20 people, so we can fit in there, otherwise we’ll bring them into [the theater]. If they want to call the resort and tell us they’re going to be here, that would be really great so we can plan on how many people we’ve got. If they forgot to do that, don’t hold that against yourself. Still come. We’re hoping to get people loving theater, hoping to play a character. We also want people who are wanting to do sets, costumes, or any aspect of theater. We want to work with the OLT. We don’t want to feel like we’re letting anybody out or that we’re better than anybody. In a real place, this is what actor’s do… they act all of the time and go to classes when they’re not acting.”

The read-through will occur at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 10. At the Mena Mountain Resort, located at 2817 U.S. Hwy. 71. The resort number is 479394-3110.

“This is a play you’re not going to find on YouTube,” Hesse said. “A lot of plays, if it’s an old play like the one we just did, ‘You Can’t Take it With You,’ everybody’s school did it. This is a play that was written by somebody in college, and it never really was performed professionally, so you can’t really look it up and see it.”

Submitted by Julie Ulmer

It has long been a tradition for Ouachita Little Theatre to perform live shows at Christmastime to give our community a special way to celebrate the holidays with their family and friends. OLT just announced that this year there will be not one, but two shows to help you get into the holiday spirit.

First will be “The Gift of the Magi,” which will be a special performance by our Lyric Players Group, wellknown around town for their Readers Theatre shows. Directed by Ann Glenn, this will be their most elaborate show yet, with costumes and set pieces that will require seven actors. Most performers will be able to rely on their scripts and won’t necessarily have to move around the stage a lot, but Ann is looking for a couple of young performers who will need to memorize their lines to play the newlyweds in the famous O. Henry story.

The cast for “The Gift of the Magi” calls for four women and three men: Jim and Della (a young couple, celebrating their first married Christmas together), Mrs. Boyd (a motherly neighbor), Madame Sofronie (a businesswoman), Felice (her as-