Free Casting Calls & Auditions

ASTROFF: Yes, ten years have made another man of me. And why? Because I am overworked. Nurse, I am on my feet from morning until evening. I know no rest at all: at night I shake under my bedclothes for fear I’ll be dragged out to visit some sick people. Ever since I’ve known you, I haven’t had a single carefree day. How could I help growing old? Life is tedious, anyhow; it is a senseless, dirty business, and drags heavily. Every one in this neighborhood is silly, and after you live with them for two or three years you grow silly yourself. It is inevitable. [Twisting his moustache] See what a long moustache I have grown. A silly, long moustache. Yes, I am as silly as all the others, nurse, but not as stupid; no I have not grown stupid. Thank God, my brain is not muddled yet, though my feelings have grown dull. I ask for nothing, I need nothing, I love no one, except yourself alone. [He kisses her head] When I was a child, I had a nurse just like you. [Pause] During the third week of Lent, an epidemic of eruptive typhoid broke out at Malitskoi, and I was called there. The peasants were all stretched side by side in their huts, and the calves and pigs were running about the floor among the sick. How filthy it was, and such smoke! Beyond words! I slaved among those people all day. I hadn’t a crumb to eat. But when I got home there was still no rest for me: a switchman was carried in from the railroad; I laid him on the operating table and he died in my arms under the chloroform. And then although my feelings should have been deadened, they rose again; my conscience tortured me as if I had murdered him. I sat down and shut my eyes–like this–and thought: will our descendants two hundred years from to-day, for whom we are breaking the path, remember us in a kindly spirit? No, nurse, they will forget.

Credits: Reprinted from The Moscow Arts Theatre Series of Plays. Ed. Oliver M. Sayler. New York: Brentanos, 1922.

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ASTROFF: You can burn peat in your stoves and build your barns of stone. Oh, I don’t object, of course, to cutting wood when you have to, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the ax. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and the birds have been laid desolate; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. And why? Because men are too lazy and short-sighted to stoop and pick their fuel from the ground. Am I not right? Who but a senseless barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy what he cannot create himself? Man has reason and creative energy so that he may increase his possessions. Until now, though, he has not created but destroyed. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are drying up, the game is being exterminated, the climate is spoiled and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. I read irony in your eye; you do not take seriously what I am saying; and — and — perhaps I am talking nonsense. But when I cross peasant-forests which I have saved from the ax, or hear the rustling of the young trees which I have set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I shall have been partly responsible in my small way for their happiness. When I plant a young birch tree and see it budding and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride and I — however — I must be off. Probably it is all nonsense, anyhow. Goodbye.

Credits: Reprinted from The Moscow Arts Theatre Series of Plays. Ed. Oliver M. Sayler. New York: Brentanos, 1922.

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VOINITSKY: The Professor as usual sits in his library from morning till night–

“Straining our mind, wrinkling our brow,
We write, write, write,
With no respite
Or hope of praise in the future or now.”
Unfortunate paper! He ought to write his autobiography; he would make a really excellent subject for a book! Just consider, the life of a retired professor, as stale as a piece of old bread, racked with gout, headaches and rheumatism, his liver bursting with jealousy and envy, living on the estate of his first wife, although he hates it, because he can’t afford to live in town. He is everlastingly whining about his hard fate, although, as a matter of fact, he is unusually lucky. [Nervously] He is the son of a common deacon and has achieved the professor’s chair, has become the son-in-law of a senator, is called “your Excellency,” but never mind! I’ll tell you something; he has been writing about art for twenty-five years, and he doesn’t know the very first thing about it. For twenty-five years he has been hashing over the thoughts of other men on realism, naturalism, and all such nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing things long known to clever men and uninteresting to stupid ones; for twenty-five years he has been pouring water from one empty tumbler into another. Yet consider the man’s conceit and pretensions! He has been pensioned off. No living soul has ever heard of him. He is totally unknown. That means for twenty-five years he has been sailing under false colors. But look at him! He stalks across the earth like a demi-god! I admit, I am envious of him. Look at the success he has had with women! Don Juan himself was not more lucky. His first wife, my sister, was beautiful, gentle, as pure as the blue heaven above, noble, great-hearted, with more admirers than he has pupils, and she loved him as only creatures of angelic purity can love those who are as pure and beautiful as they are themselves. His mother-in-law, my mother, adores him to this day, and he still inspires her with a kind of worshipped awe. His second wife is, as you see, a great beauty; she married him in his old age and surrendered to him all the glory of her beauty and freedom. What for? Such loyalty is false and unnatural, root and branch. It sounds very well, but there is no logic to it. It is immoral for a woman to deceive an old husband whom she hates. But for her to stifle her pathetic youth and intense longings within her–that is not immoral?!

Credits: Reprinted from The Moscow Arts Theatre Series of Plays. Ed. Oliver M. Sayler. New York: Brentanos, 1922.

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ASTROFF: I have my own desk there in Ivan’s room. When I’m simply too worn out to go on with my work, I drop everything and rush over here to forget myself in this pastime for an hour or two. Ivan Petrovitch and Sonya Alexandrovna rattle away at their counting frames, I feel warm and peaceful, the cricket chirps, and I sit near them at my table and paint. But I don’t indulge in this luxury very often, only about once a month. [Pointing to a picture] Look! This is a survey map of our country as it was fifty years ago. The green tints, both light and dark, stand for forests. Half the map, you see, is covered with them. Where the green is striped with red, the forests were stocked with elk and goats. Here in this lake were great flocks of swans and geese and ducks; as the old men say, there was a power of birds of every kind. Now they have vanished like a mist. Beside the towns and villages, you see, I have jotted down here and there the various settlements, farms, hermits’ caves and water-mills. This country was rich in cattle and horses, as you can see by the expanse of blue. For instance, see how it deepens in this part; there were great herds of them here, an average of three horses to every house. [A pause] Now, look lower down. This is the country as it was twenty-five years ago. Only a third of the map now is green with forests. There are no goats remaining and no elk. The green and blue are lighter, and so on and so forth. Now, we come to the third diagram, our country as it is to-day. Still we see spots of green, but very little. The elk, the swans, the black-cock have disappeared. On the whole, it is the picture of a continuous and slow decline which will evidently come to completion in about ten or fifteen years. Perhaps you may object that it is the march of progress, that the old order must give way to the new, and you would be right if roads had been built through these ruined forests, or if factories and schools had taken their place. Then the people would have become better educated and healthier and richer, but as it is, we have nothing of the kind. We have the same swamps and mosquitos; the same disease and misery: typhoid, diptheria, fires. The degradation of our country confronts us, brought on by the human race’s fierce struggle for existence. It is all the result of the ignorance and heedlessness of starving, shivering, ill humanity. To save our children, we snatch instinctively at everything that can warm us and satisfy our hunger. Therefore we consume everything on which we can lay our hands, without a thought for the future. And so almost everything has been destroyed and nothing created to take its place. [Coldly] But I can see by your expression that it does not interest you.

Credits: Reprinted from The Moscow Arts Theatre Series of Plays. Ed. Oliver M. Sayler. New York: Brentanos, 1922.