AUDITION FORM: https://forms.gle/G5yLmecfKxvtTiEn9
Love. Art. Defiance. The visceral and visual true story of forgotten modern artist Rudolf Bauer, struggling with his fading place in the history of art as his paintings are removed from the walls of the Guggenheim Museum.
“It’s about a contract. The story unfolds as Hilla von Rebay, Bauer’s former lover, arrives at the house in New Jersey where he’s living with his loving wife, Louise, and not painting. Bauer had been an early and well-known non-objective artist in Germany. Under Hitler, the work of this avant garde artist was included in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, and he had been imprisoned for his art by the Nazis. Solomon Guggenheim who, encouraged by Rebay, had been collecting his work for his planned Museum of Non-objective Painting, managed to have him released.
Finding refuge in the United States, Bauer signed a contract, brokered by Rebay, that ceded all his future work to the Guggenheim collection, for which he received a guaranteed stipend and use of a fine house in New Jersey. Bauer claims he signed without understanding what the contract said. Still, the arrangement may have made good sense at the time when Solomon Guggenheim was his protector, but after Solomon’s death his heirs had a different view of Bauer’s art and relegated his paintings to the “basement.” None of his work was included in the opening exhibition of the Guggenheim Museum: by then it was all about Kandinsky. How galling that must have been, how unbearable.
Gunderson’s play imagines an encounter of Bauer, Rebay and Louise twelve years after the contract and Bauer’s estrangement from Rebay. She arrives at the house in New Jersey with the goal of getting him to start painting again, to make a try at breaking the Guggenheim contract, to fulfill his talent and — since under the new heirs she’d lost her job as head of the Guggenheim — to give her something important to do in the world of art.
The powerful emotional heart of the play is Bauer’s anger, frustration, bitterness and — less inevitably — his spiteful refusal to paint, the only way he sees to evade the trap in which the contract places him. He has not painted for twelve years for one reason (at least as the play would have it): to deprive the Guggenheim of the works stipulated in the contract. His passive-aggressive stance seems fully understandable, even heroic but Bauer is at the same time depriving himself of fulfilling his talent.”
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Auditions: Saturday August 31st, 12:00pm
AUDITION FORM: https://forms.gle/G5yLmecfKxvtTiEn9
Audition requirements:
-Please prepare a 1-2 minute monologue
-Cold reads are likely, but might be used as for callbacks, depending on auditions!
Rehearsals: Either M/W at 6:30 or M/Th at 6:30, depending on cast preference
Performances: November 22nd, 23rd
Ages: 18+
Director: Christopher Milligan
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Cast Breakdown:
* Rudolf Bauer: 64, The tortured title character who battles the urge to paint with the feeling of not being able to do so because of the position he is in of no longer owning what he creates. A brilliant but hardened man, he can't get out trom under his own shadow gray-white hair. Louise calls him Rudi (pronounced "Roody")
* Louise Bauer: 50s, very pretty, defensive, likes things to be calm and ordered (pronounced closer to "Louiseh" than "Loueezz"). Bauer's caring wife, who, in a last desperate attempt to make her husband paint again, invites his ex-lover Hilla Rebay to their home.
* Hilla Rebay: 63, A powerful, tempestuous, natural force of a woman. Bauer's long-gone German lover who started a relationship with Guggenheim and made Bauer sign the contract giving up his art. A powerful, tempestuous, natural force of a woman.