Call to High School Actors

Playwright, writer, and director, Brian Triber, is looking for high school actors to act in a short 10-minute dramatic presentation that will be performed as part of a very exciting multimedia community event, Pictures at an Exhibition: A Tribute to Friendships. This event, taking place on on November 5, 2016, 4:00pm at the Jenkins Auditorium in Malden, is a community art event that consists of a concert, dramatic presentation, art exhibit (also featuring high school artists), multi-media projections, and an invitation to the public to display a tribute or honor a friend during the open mike portion of the performance.

For the young actors of Malden, this will be an opportunity to be on stage with a world-renowned pianist, work with an imaginative and esteemed theatre director and writer, and gain experience acting outside of the school curriculum. Actors will also receive headshots they can use for other purposes as part of the publicity for the event. They will also receive a video recording of the performance.

Details about the Dramatic Presentation and Requirements are on the following page.


This dramatic presentation introduces a story of one Russian composer’s response to the loss of a friend. The composer, Modest Mussorgsky, hears of the loss of dear friend artist Viktor Hartmann and writes “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life” – and creatures like Hartmann must die!”

Mussorgsky dwells in his sadness but finds inspiration by an exhibition of Hartmann’s paintings, held in tribute to Hartmann and his work. Taking home a few of Hartmann’s paintings, sadness turns creative. In under a month, Mussorgsky composes Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite for piano that musically depicts the “composer… himself walking now right, now left, now as an idle person, now urged to go near a picture; at times his joyous appearance is dampened, he thinks in sadness of his dead friend. …” Though many of Hartmann’s paintings are lost, the tribute of ten movements to honor one man’s friend lives on.

The dramatic presentation will consist of four presentational vignettes and a closing moment.

  • Each scene will be sandwiched with promenade transitions.
  • Vignettes will consist of dramatic dialogues between two actors, in analogues of period costumes (if obtainable), with other cast members in black, performing dumb shows of Hartmann’s paintings, with props.
  • Alternately, given enough actors, roles will be rotated on and offstage among the performers, to provide a speaking role for each.

Scenes:

  • Opening
  • Gnome – Mask of papier-mâché, stringy beard & eyebrows, paint. Shredded fabric shirt & dummy pants
  • Eggs – Cardboard forms worn over shoulders, painted white.
  • Catacombs – Skeleton masks of papier-mâchét
  • Baba Yaga’s Hut – Hut of sticks mounted on black cardboard. Chicken legs of sticks mounted on shin pads.
  • Closing

Rehearsals and Casting Call

  • A casting call will take place in the next two weeks.
  • From the week of October 10 to November 5, there may be up to three rehearsals weekly, 2 1/2 hours each. Rehearsals will take place in Malden, location TBD.
  • The calendar for rehearsals will be listed on artfulwebs.com/pictures

About Brian Triber: from Triber’s website, briantriber.com
“Brian Triber, a Malden, Massachusetts native, has been writing plays and fiction for over 25 years, and has 15 years experience writing and editing technical manuals in the computer industry. Of his numerous plays, several were produced in Boston and at Cornell University, including his one-act The Gulls’ Lament, which received a staged reading at the 1995 Boston Playwrights Platform.

Brian was cofounder of two theater companies: the community theater Mainstayge of Malden, which received a special Judges Award at the New England Theatre Conference (NETC) for its production of Paul Selig’s Terminal Bar; and the now-defunct Ubiquity Stage, a small theater company that produced exclusively in Boston. The theater went dark — in the financial black — after 4 years, 15 productions, and garnering numerous positive reviews, and appearances on WBZ’s Jordan Rich Show.

He has a summa cum laude degree in Interior Design, and is a theatrical set and lighting designer. He received two NETC lighting design awards and an additional nomination, including the first-ever lighting design award for Next Door Theatre, Revere’s 45-minute cutting of the musical Pippin, which he still remembers averaged 3 lighting cues per minute.

He continues to write short-stories and novels from his home. You can read the latest on his mind at his Blog, briantriber.com.”