To find new talent, McCarter Theatre Center’s longtime artistic director Emily Mann likes to sit in on auditions. “Often I like to go to the early auditions, not just the callbacks,” she says. “Even when they’re not hired, you see lots and lots and lots of people come through the door.”
This emphasis on auditions is why, when the New Jersey institution begins a new production, the first step is usually choosing casting directors. According to Mann, different directors have different specialties. “We use an array [of casting directors]—those who are best for casting people of color, those who are best at classic work,” she says. “There are slight differences [in] sensibilities.”
Those differences are key in casting McCarter’s mix of world premieres, contemporary favorites, and reinvented classics. For example, this season opened with the world premiere of Nilo Cruz’s “Bathing in Moonlight,” but the most recent presentation was of two classic plays in repertory: “Hamlet” and “Saint Joan” from Bedlam. The theater offers wildly different productions with different casting needs and very specific challenges. During the casting process for “Bathing in Moonlight,” which required an all-Latino cast, Mann was looking for a Latino actor who could play the lead role, but “they were all very booked.” Then, the casting director for that production, Laura Stanczyk, asked Mann to take a look at a scene in Netflix’s “Narcos” featuring Mexican actor Raúl Méndez. Though he had a heavy accent, the theater hired a dialect coach, and gave the actor, who is a star in his native country, his American stage debut. In cases like that, new talent came to the McCarter via “a great casting director, and then I took a big chance,” says Mann proudly. “He’s going to have a real career in America now.”
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Theater programming is just a fraction of what Mann does at the McCarter, which also presents dance, music, and special events. It is located on the campus of Princeton University. “We look at the things that we most love and try to get a season that has a great deal of variety of purpose, style, [and] content,” she says, adding with a chuckle, “and then we look at whether we can afford it.”
New plays are a particular passion of Mann’s, who is a playwright herself. Besides newer fare such as “Bathing in Moonlight” and Ayad Akhtar’s “Disgraced,” the theater’s season is closing this spring with more well-known titles: an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express” by Ken Ludwig, running March 14–April 2, and “Intimate Apparel” by Lynn Nottage, running May 5–June 4.
McCarter usually employs both New Jersey and New York actors, and holds an open casting call every spring. For actors looking to make themselves known to the theater, Mann advises giving a good audition. “I wish they knew that when they come in to audition, we’re hoping they’re the answers to our dreams,” Mann says. “I’m always very excited to meet someone. Even if you don’t get that role, many times, I’ve cast that person later in another show. So think of an audition as an opportunity to meet and to see if we’ll someday work together.”
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