“Becky’s New Car” is a very funny comedy about what it might be like to try a new life for a while. Actors get a chance to not only talk to the audience but seek their advice. And, as long as Becky keeps her millionaire friend in the dark about who she really is, she gets to keep enjoying what it might be like to change everything in her world. Needed are three women and four men. Auditions are Monday and Tuesday – February 4th and 5th from 4:30 PM to 6:30PM.
This EdgeWild Players production, directed by Patricia Feld, will be performed April 25-28, 2013.
Here is a chance to act in a play that is funny, challenging, and enjoyable. A chance to help Becky stroll through an existence one might fondly wonder about, but only can experience in imagination or onstage! Becky gets the chance to really do it and learns a lot about herself in the process. The cast of characters needed for the play below covers a nice range of middle-American society. Below is a poster with a "Variety" comment about the play.
Becky Foster – Looking for someone who can play a forty something looking woman with quick comic timing, a range of emotions and very is charismatic. Becky Foster works for a car dealership.
Joe Foster – Looking for someone who can play a forty something man, salt-of-the-earth type, who is a good husband who means well but settled in his ways. Joe Foster works as a roofer.
Chris Foster – Needed is an actor who can play a mid-twenties son, living in the basement and is a psychology student.
Walter Flood – If you would like to play a wealthy businessman, one who is 60 and widowed…Walter Flood would be your choice.
Kenni Flood – Needed is someone to play Walters’s daughter, who is in her early twenties who means well…but. Kenni Flood appears in the second act.
Steve – Can you play a 50ish car salesman who works with Becky?….He’s NOT your typical car salesman.
Ginger – How would you like to try to be Walter’s neighbor in her fifties? We are not sure about her plans, and she appears in the second act.
Written by Steven Dietz's (above) “Becky's New Car”, had its world premiere on October 23, 2008 in Seattle and has kept audiences laughing very successfully since. It won a Steinberg/American Theatre Critics New American Play Award for a play that opened out side of New York. Dietz placed eighth on the Top Ten Most Produced Playwrights in America.
So come out and audition for this play, it will help pass winter and keep you laughing too.
Below is a part of the Seattle Times review of this play and here is the URL if you wish to read more. Above is a picture from the Seattle opening of the play.
http://seattletimes.com/html/thearts/2008280381_dietz20.html
Steven Deitz's "Becky's New Car" was written as a birthday present:
The new Steven Dietz play "Becky's New Car" plays at Seattle's ACT Theatre Oct. 17-Nov. 16.
By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic
Steven Dietz is the prolific author of more than two dozen plays, and his work has been presented at major theaters around the U.S. But "Becky's New Car," in previews at ACT Theatre, is the only play he's created as a birthday present from a husband to his wife.
The wife Dietz wrote it for is not his own (fellow playwright Allison Gregory) but another man's spouse.
How's that? Let Dietz, a part-time Seattle resident with long ties to this area's theater community, explain.
"'Becky's New Car' was commissioned in a program ACT started recently, where anybody can underwrite a new play as a gift to someone," said Dietz, by phone from Austin, Texas, where he spends the academic year teaching writing at University of Texas.
Seattle commercial realtor Charles Staadecker commissioned "Becky's New Car" for his wife Benita, an ACT trustee. And that led to the forging of ACT's New Works for the American Stage, which grants $5,000 to $8,000 per year over a three-year period to a writer toiling on a new script ACT might produce later. (The company won't specify the exact amount of Dietz's commission.)
"I wanted to make this gift to Benita something unusual and memorable, something that would be a real legacy," says Staadecker. And yes, his theater-loving wife was indeed pleased by the gesture.
"On Betina's birthday," notes Dietz, "I sent her the play's first scene."
The practice of arts patrons funding new works in tribute to friends or lovers was commonplace in, say, Shakespeare's day, and Mozart's.
It happens far less frequently now, but Dietz says he's been happy to oblige with "Becky's New Car," a satirical comedy that sounds like a cross between the Demi Moore film "Indecent Proposal" and the Craig Lucas farce "Reckless."
"My play is about a regular middle-class woman, Becky, who works in an auto dealership and her husband is a roofer," Dietz elaborated. "She meets this slightly eccentric, somewhat bumbling millionaire, and through a bunch of misunderstandings, he offers her a chance to live a kind of parallel existence."
The idea of having a secret double life fascinated Dietz.
"I think we all love those great little stories you find in the corner of the newspaper — you know, 'after his death, Florida man is revealed to have three different families.' That felt like the stuff of comedy to me."
The settings and subjects of Dietz plays have been all over the map — from 19th-century France (in "Inventing van Gogh") to 1990s Seattle ("Lonely Planet") and the isle of Grenada during the Reagan Era ("Halcyon Days"). But he often ponders secrets, lies and identity, and employs strokes of sardonic humor.
As for "Becky's New Car," Dietz insists his benefactors the Staadeckers "put no restrictions on me in terms of the writing. But they have become very enmeshed in the production, coming to rehearsals and watching over the project. And really, I've just loved having them around."…
