lifestyles
'I hope I get it'
Auditions for the spring season of University Theatre test the nerves of many KU students
Story by Luisa Flores Photos by Matt Flickner
Above: KU students wait for their auditions.
Left: Meg Eggers, Atchison senior, prepares for her audition as a bulimic with a passion for oranges. Below: Brent Noel, teaching assistant in theatre and film, talks to potential actors and actresses.
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25-year-old Marine who killed his old dog, a woman who shot her husband and a bulimic who made an orange the object of her desire told parts of their stories Wednesday night.
KU students represented those and other dramatic characters at the Crafton-Preyer Theatre in the last auditions for
plays that University Theatre will offer this spring. The Theatre will be offering three plays: "Dancing at Lughnasa," "The Crucible," and "The Adding Machine."
During the auditions, students performed part of a dramatic piece for up to two minutes for Theatre directors Brent Noel, teaching assistant in theater and
film, Ron Willis, professor in theater and film, and Jack Wright, professor in theater and film.
Wright, director of "Dancing at Lughnasa," said that the first audition was an open-call audition in which all students who wanted to participate could do so without previous screening. The students could choose between performing with memorized material or by cold reading.
paced back and forth in Murphy's front lobby.
Call-back auditions were Thursday, and final auditions were Friday.
"Every director, depending on the play he's working on, knows the kind of qualities that the characters of the play should have and the relationships that a character should have," Wright said. "So, we are looking for those qualities and relationships. We look for actors who are imaginative, who are inventive and those who demonstrate ease."
Before entering the theater, students practiced their roles and calmed their nerves. They repeated their lines, performed relaxation exercises or simply
Silas Hoover, Topeka freshman, said he auditioned because he wanted to remain active in the theater department as much as possible in order to get more experience in acting. Hoover participated in the Theatre's performance of "Jesus Christ Superstar" last fall.
Hoover said he spent two hours memorizing his
nologue. In the nologue, from "Nebraska," a 25-year-old Marine explains why and how he killed his dog, Gidget. To envision his character, Hoover bent forward. His eyes revealed sadness.
"She started dragging her body around, limping and huffing, falling down," he said. "Finally she could hardly get up. I had to pick her up just to get her outside into the sun. Gidget gistet
on this old blanket not lifting her head, making these sounds, you know, groans and sighs,'cause she knew she was going.
"So today, I lifted her up, put her in the back of the car, drove out Route 24 to this field, lay her down, shot her right behind the ear... I didn't think about it. I just shot her. Smoked a cigarette and waited 'il I knew her soul had left her."
Hoover said that he liked the piece because it was concise and because he related it to the death of his own dog.
Other students prepared for their auditions differently. Leyla Strotkamp, Peabody sophomore, spoke calmly before her audition.
"I am trying to relax," she said. "I am trying to get into the world of my character before the audition."
Strokamp chose a monologue by Babe in "Crimes of the Heart," in which a woman who had shot her husband tried to explain to her sisters how it happened.
University Theatre Productions
Play Performance Dates
Dancing at Lughnase;
March 3-4,9-12
The Crucible;
March 31-April 2, April 4-8
The Adding Machine;
April 18-23, 25-30
Call the University Theatre, 864-3381, for more information.
Stroktamp said her main goal was to get to the callback auditions.
"I am testing my potential," she said. "I really enjoy being involved in theater. I have been doing it all my life, and I want to keep doing it."
Strokkamp and Hoover will appear in "Wiley and the Hairy Man," a play produced by The University of Kansas Theatre for Young People.
While Strokamp sat close to the main doors getting into the mood of her role, Meg L. Eggers, Atchison senior, paced back and forth in Murphy's front lobby while holding an orange. She smelled the orange, passed it from one hand to the other and threw it into the air, all while trying to create a character from "The Orange." The character is a bulimic woman who feels an obsessive passion for an orange.
Eggers said that she hoped to get involved in some of the coming productions.
Noel said that the students were doing very well in the auditions. He said that this was the last audition of the semester, but that there were other opportunities for students to get involved in theater. Noel said that auditions for directing-class scenes and other special projects that are important for the students' training would be announced on the Green Room callback in Murphy Hall later this semester.
Newt-TV: America can't get enough
After conquering Congress, Newt Gingrich is taking on another powerful entity — television
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — The personality on your television screen is unmistakable. The snowy hair. The crackling energy. The call to arms: Stop the insanity!
Say hello to Newt Gingrich, who wants nothing less than for America to trim its flabby government and who never tires of saying so, particularly to a television audience that recently may have begun to wonder if Newt-TV is taking over the airwaves.
No, it's another take-charge TV presence. A history prof,racy novelist and the brand-new speaker of the House.
But wait, this isn't Susan Powter razzing you about your flabby thighs.
Mighty, indeed. Just hours earlier, Connie Chung had called Gingrich the man who could be the most powerful leader in the country in her lead-in to an "Eye to Eye" visit with Kathleen and Robert Gingrich, "America's hottest political parents."
"When something's hot, it's hot," Gingrich acknowledged on last week's "Nightline" edition, "Newt: Superstar." "For the moment, I'm a little bit like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were three years ago or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are now."
If they really were as hot as she claimed, it was largely thanks to Gintrus' heated preemptive strike to her segment about them. Hours before it aired, he had taken to television to rail about Chung's interview with his mother, who, Gingrich charged, was tricked by Chung into telling the world what he had privately called Hillary Rodham Clinton a word that rhymes with "Gingrich".
Newt Gingrich
Before the CBS eye could blink, jokes were flying at the network's expense: "CBS' stands for 'Connie Betrays Secrets," went one.
But to make matters even worse, the controversy failed to ignite viewership. As usual, nobody watched "Eye to Eye" (it ranked 52nd for the week), while NBC's red-hot rival "Seinfeld" bagged first place. Score: Glennurth > Chung Yu.
Score: Gingrich, one: Chung. zin.
Of course, Gingrich isn't the only politician who knows something about scoring in television. But the representative from Georgia may have been among the first to apply a simple rule: Even with TV, if you want to get your message to the people, go straight to the people.
He tapped C-SPAN early on, for instance, pleading his case at length to a home audience during House proceedings, even when
no one was in the House chambers to hear what he said.
For the past year, he's even had his own weekly TV show. It can be seen on NET, which isn't a typo for "Newt" but actually stands for National Empowerment Television, a 24-hour cable channel owned by the conservative Free Congress Foundation. Gingrich hosts NET's most high-profile hour, "The Progress Report," Tuesday nights at 9 p.m.
There, and elsewhere on the TV, a man largely unknown by most viewers until very recently now seems downright iconic.
Already oh, so familiar are the video clips of his bear-like but brisk gait through the corridors of power. The sound bites of his powdery tenor. The ample smile, by turns fatherly and sly.
Gingrich is Washington's newest star, even among the liberal press.
CNN political analyst William Schneider has marveled at how Gingrich draws attention not only to himself, but to Congress by putting a face on what historically is a faceless institution.
"No speaker of the House has ever been covered this way," Schneider told viewers last week.
If last week is any indication, Gingrich's first 100 days as speaker should make for not only lively government, but also colorful viewing.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
People and places at the University of Kansas.
Lead Story
In October, New York City police arrested Herbert Steed, 63, outside his $4,000-a-month Trump Tower apartment (he was preparing to buy a $5 million home in Rye, N.Y.) and charged him with welfare fraud. For the last three years, Steed was receiving $88 a week in welfare payments by claiming he had no assets or income. "The... welfare payments he collected just about covered his health club clubs," said the district attorney.
Also in New York City, a woman who used 15 names and who said she had 73 nonexistent children pleaded guilty to defraud-
ingstate and local welfare authorities out of $450,000. And in March, the New York City district attorney announced that of 1,800 welfare recipients spot-checked in a single Newark, N.J., neighborhood, 425 were simultaneously — and illegally — receiving New York City welfare benefits.
In October, a distraught Washington, D.C., mother turned to volunteer searchers, including felons living in a halfway house, to find her 11-year-old son after police told her they could not begin searching immediately because of department regulations. Police told the mother they could only search immediately if the missing person was under age 6, over age 85, had a mental condition or disability, or was on medication.
In August, the Wall Street Journal reported on Idaho scrap-metal dealer Tom Johansen's legitimate 1993 purchase of state-of-the-art nuclear reprocessing equipment from a Department of Energy (DOE) surplus sale. Johansen also was able to obtain operating instructions for making bomb-grade uranium with the equipment by paying DOE a $280 photocopying fee. The Journal said the sale went through because the DOE man in charge was about to retire and could not persuade his superiors of the inappropriateness of selling such dangerous materials.
The Weirdo-American Community
In March, Hollywood, Fla., police charged Brenda Persing, 34, with two counts of child abuse when they found the stay-at-home mother's house filled with "years' worth" of rotting garbage, as well as dog feces and used tampons, and found her refrigerator full of roaches. According to police, Persing admitted she was just too lazy to clean.
Miscellaneous Eloquence
Frederick Treesh, 30, one of three men accused of being the gang of spree killers that terrorized the Great Lakes states last summer allegedly told a police officer, "Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol-whipped and the light bulbs we stuck in people's mouths, we really didn't hurt anybody."