For Immediate Release:
 
UT Theatre Department Head
Elected President of
University/Resident Theatre Association
 
Calvin MacLean, Department Head of Theatre at the University of Tennessee and Artistic Director of the Clarence Brown Theatre recently was elected president of the University/Resident Theatre Association (URTA) by a unanimous vote of participating URTA member universities. MacLean will assume responsibilities as president in July 2010 for a two-year term.
 
“Cal takes on the presidency with considerable knowledge about URTA. He also has this terrific leadership background of both an important training program at Tennessee, and a major professional, LORT theatre in the Clarence Brown.  This linkage between training and professional theatre perfectly reflects URTA¹s constituency and central interests,” said Scott Steele, URTA¹s Executive Director.
 
MacLean has been with the University of Tennessee for four years.  Under his leadership, the Clarence Brown Theatre has experienced a renaissance, with increased ticket sales, increased corporate sponsorships and revitalized Board support.
 
“Cal’s leadership has energized the entire arts community. Subscriptions are up. Sponsorship has grown and the productions have been outstanding. We’re proud that he has been elected president of URTA and hope all the members will come to Knoxville and see, first hand, what a great theatre program he has created,” said Townes Osborn, Chair of the Clarence Brown Theatre Society Advisory Board.
 
Marrying the professional theatre with the Theatre Department¹s academic program, MacLean has improved an already outstanding graduate training program and revitalized undergraduate theatre education.
 
Previously, he was Professor of Theatre and Head of Directing at Illinois State University for fifteen years, and Artistic Director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival.  Active in Chicago, he earned numerous awards as a director, most notably for his production of Joshua Sobol’s “Ghetto,” which won four Joseph Jefferson Awards including Outstanding Production of a Play and the first-ever Michael Maggio Award for Outstanding Direction. Other professional credits include Chicago’s Tony Award winning Victory Gardens Theatre, the Connecticut Repertory Theatre, and Indiana Repertory.
 
URTA is the nation’s oldest and largest consortium of professional, graduate theatre training programs and associated professional theatre companies.
URTA advances theatre by connecting educational theatre programs with professional theatre and performing arts industries, promoting professional practices and artistic excellence in higher education, and assisting students with their transition into the profession.
 
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Hello,         

Thank you for your interest in auditioning for “Green Corn”.

My name is Jeff Atkins. I am an Associate Producer for the movie.  Please feel free to contact me at this email address (greencornmovie@gmail.com) with further questions or information. 

If you have not included the date and location you wish to make an appointment to audition, please let me know and I will send you an appointment time.  We will try and accommodate your time request(s), but since we have had a good response to the call, you may want to include a second time to schedule your appointment. 

If you have a headshot, please include with your audition time request(s).  If not, please bring a shot to the auditions, if possible.

Brian Cagle, the director is currently out of the country and will be reviewing the initial round of taped auditions prior to returning to Tennessee.  If you have a conflict with the March 26-27 auditions, you may send a demo reel of your work.

Please find below, the Audition Details, Character Descriptions, and Synopsis.

Again thanks for your interest.  We look forward to meeting you.

Good luck!

Jeff Atkins
Associate Producer
Audition Details:

~ Suspense crime drama with comedic twist
~ All types, adults all ages (18-80)
~ Shooting dates: June 15 - July 12 (tentative)
~ Some pay for principal roles only. Meals provided.
~ SAG / Aftra welcome
~ Auditions to be held in Knoxville and Ashville, Friday March 26, 3 PM - 8 PM; Saturday March 27, 10 AM - 3 PM (Location TBA)
~ Auditions by appointment only.
~ With reply, include contact information: name, ph, text #, email
~ No monologues, sides provided upon arrival.  Experience preferred but not required.
~ To reserve an audition time and for further details, please reply to greencornmovie@gmail.com
Character Descriptions:

Papaw - (70s-80s / male), caucasian, patriarch, suffering from dementia, a former bootlegger and fiercely independent, the last of his breed.
Kelly - (20s / male), caucasian, an outsider in his own time & place, a deep thinker and self-styled master of his domain, usually cool as a cucumber but prone to lose his temper over the little things.
Red - (late 40s / male), caucasian, friend to everyone but a bit odd by all accounts, a burly mountain-man and non-stop raconteur that can talk a blue streak.
Ruby - (20s / female), caucasian, backbone of the family who hides her frustration well, the moral center and an expert florist.
Angel - (20s / female), caucasian, world-weary & streetwise (for a country girl).
Tracy - (20s / male), caucasian, a charming psycho, capable of harm and eager for a rep as such.
Gut-Boy - (20s / male), caucasian, built like a brick shit-house and the muscle for Tracy, the strong silent type who seems like he wouldn’t hurt a fly - until he’s got a hold of you.
Church (50s-60s / male), the independent businessman with his hand in a little bit of everything, good & bad, but likes to keep himself clean so he has Tracy and Gut-Boy do most of his dirty work.

Synopsis:

“Green Corn” is the story of a family who live deep in the hills of Tennessee on the border of the Smokies.  The patriarch, Papaw, is in the early stages of dementia.  The Greencorn family is entrenched in generations of old time bootlegging and with the changing times, moved into marijuana cultivating and harvesting.  The business and general household duties are taken care of by an adult granddaughter and grandson.  The grandson comes across an unconscious young woman in the woods on the family farm.  From here the plot thickens introducing small town intrigue corruption and crime web, of which the Greencorn family have spent their whole lives trying to avoid. 

Producers:

Brain Cagle (writer, producer, director) is a filmmaker from Chattanooga, whose previous short films have appeared at several Southern festivals, as well as the Hunter Museum of American Art, and has also produced an award-winning documentary for the Chattanooga Regional History Museum.   He currently teaches in the Radio-TV-Film program at Northwestern University, where he will be returning in the Fall after a 2-year stint in Qatar, where he has served as part of the start-up team to inaugurate Northwestern’s new School of Communication campus in Doha, which opened in 2008.

Oscar Boyson is a New York City based filmmaker and producer. He recently completed the short documentary “An Emasculating Truth,” in association with Levi Strauss/Dockers, and wrapped production on the new television show “Neistat Brothers” for HBO.

The UT Department of English will sponsor a lecture “Greek Theater and Democratic Thought: Arendt to Rancière” by Richard Halpern, Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. The lecture will be held on Thursday, March 18th, in 1210 McClung Tower, from 4-5. A short reception with the scholar will follow.

On Friday, March 19th at noon, in 1210 McClung Tower, Professor Halpern will lead a seminar on his recent essay “Eclipse of Action: “Hamlet and the Political Economy of Playing” (in Shakespeare Quarterly 59.4 [2008]). Graduate students are especially encouraged to attend, though others are welcome.

At both talks, Professor Halpern will speak about his current book project “Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy,” which traces the dilemma of modern tragedy to an economic context that elevates making or production over doing or action, and uses this context to cast a retrospective glance over the history of tragic drama from Aeschylus to Beckett.

Professor Halpern’s research interests include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, especially drama; Shakespeare; modernism; literary theory, especially Marxist and psychoanalytic; aesthetics; science and literature. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud and Lacan (Penn, 2002), an exploration of relations between sexuality and aesthetics. His most recent book is Norman Rockwell: The Underside of Innocence (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Professor Halpern has taught at Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale. He won an NEH Fellowship in 1993-1994 and is currently on the editorial board of English Literary History.

Richard Halpern’s visit is part of the 2009-2010 Visiting Speakers Series sponsored by the Department of English.

The lecture and seminar are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Mary Dzon (mdzon@utk.edu).
 

Bare Feet on a Cold Floor
by Kathryn Rickson

will be read on the stage of the Carousel Theatre Saturday, February 13 at 12 Noon.

featuring: Elizabeth Norment, David Kortemeier, and Ned Schmidtke of the cast of Oedipus the King.

A discussion will follow. 

Auditions:  Tellico Village production of BUS STOP