Character Breakdown / Project Needs
Cast list is as follows:
The Actor's Nightmare:
-- George Spelvin: It is his nightmare, age 20-30 who wanders into the theatre.
-- Meg: The Stage Manager, age 25-30 in jeans and sweatshirt, pleasant and efficient
-- Sara Siddons: Glamorous actress in a sweeping cape, age 30-40.
-- Dame Ellen Terry: age 20-30, less grand then Sara.
-- Henry Irving: Formal actor age 28-30.
Baby with the Bathwater:
-- Helen: age late 20's to early 30's, The Mother
-- John: age late 20's to early 30's, The Father
-- Young Man - Daisy: Their son.
-- Cynthia: Very sweet girl who is dressed shabbily and is quite pregnant, has the ability to sing.
-- Versatile actress to play several parts:
-- Nanny: dresses in tweed and lady like hat.
-- A woman in the park
-- Mrs. Willoughby, the principal
-- Susan
-- Miss Pringle, a teacher
Parts being played by same actor in both plays (Nightmare/Baby):
-- George Spelvin / Young Man - Daisy
-- Sara Siddons / Helen
-- Henry Irving / John
-- Dame Ellen Terry / Cynthia and/or multi part role
-- Meg / Cynthia and/or multi part role
"Baby in the Bathwater"
Helen and John are very unprepared for parenthood. They can’t seem to name the baby. John thinks it’s a boy, but Helen says the doctors said they could decide later. When the baby cries, they can’t quite decide what to do. To their rescue comes Nanny – who enters their apartment as if by magic, and is full of abrupt shifts of mood, first cooing at the baby soothingly, then screaming at it. In subsequent scenes, John and Nanny have an affair, Helen takes baby and leaves, only to come back a moment later rain-soaked and unhappy. (“Well if it isn’t Nora five minutes after the end of A Doll’s House,” says Nanny.) At some point they finally name the baby Daisy, and as a toddler, Daisy has a penchant for running in front of buses; or for lying, depressed, in piles of laundry. We hear an alarming essay Daisy has written in school, and the principal, the terrifying Miss Willoughby, is oblivious to the essay’s cry for help, and instead gleefully awards it an A for style. Finally, we meet Daisy – dressed as a girl, but otherwise a polite, confused young man. In a “jump cut” sort of scene, we follow his years and years of therapy, where he alternates feeling depressed and angry, and is unable to complete his Freshman essay on Gulliver’s Travels for over 5 years. In the end the play comes full circle as the former Daisy and his young bride fondly regard their own baby—forgiving of the past but determined not to repeat its calamitous mistakes.
"Actor's Nightmare"
Having casually wandered onstage, George is informed that one of the actors, Eddie, has been in an auto accident and he must replace him immediately. Apparently no one is sure of what play is being performed but George (costumed as Hamlet) seems to find himself in the middle of a scene from Private Lives, surrounded by such luminaries as Sarah Siddons, Dame Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. As he fumbles through one missed cue after another the other actors shift to HAMLET, then a play by Samuel Beckett, and then a climactic scene from what might well be A Man for All Seasons-by which time the disconcerted George has lost all sense of contact with his fellow performers. Yet, in the closing moments of the play, he rises to the occasion and finally says the right lines, whereupon make-believe suddenly gives way to reality as the executioner's axe (meant for Sir Thomas Moore) instead sends poor George to oblivion-denying him a well-earned curtain call.
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