“Audition Sides” debuted at the San Diego International Fringe Festival in 2024 and took audiences into the stressful world of callbacks for a play. It also won Most Outstanding Premiere. Now Riot Productions is staging an encore of its play this weekend at Moxie Theatre.
Actors are used to being paired with total strangers for auditions. But what if you were paired with an ex from a messy, unfinished relationship?
"This would be a nightmare for me to have to navigate," said Sarah Alida LeClair, but it’s a nightmare she wrote for herself in "Audition Sides."
She plays an actress who ends up having to perform an intimate, romantic scene with an ex she still has feelings for.
"We give a lot of trust to the actors around us. And that's hard if it's somebody who you've broken trust with in real life," LeClair said. "How am I still going to book this job and pull it together and give an authentic performance within reason while seeing the person who's the one person I would never want to see — and the only person that I want to see?"
The inspiration for this story began in history and the unfulfilled romance between composer/pianist/singer Clara Schumann and composer Johannes Brahms in the 1800s.
"I wondered if they were to find each other in a random room where they had to be together?" LeClair proposed. "How do you have a conversation with someone who is everything to you and won't be your partner? What do you do with the love that's left over? And how do you navigate that relationship? And is there a way to be professional with someone who you just want to write music for and dwell in this love bubble with? How do you navigate that? So that's what this story is about, just in a modern setting."
And that modern setting involves something LeClair knows very well — the competitive world of callbacks. That was a world director Rhiannon McAfee also wanted to dive into.
"Actors are constantly asked to compete while pretending that they're not," McAfee said. "They walk into a room and they offer this incredible vulnerability — emotional, psychological and physical — with no safety net and no protection. And they are consistently asked to just accept rejection with no explanation and to internalize silence as feedback and walk out of those rooms wondering if they weren't chosen. Was it because they weren't enough or because they were too much? And I think that repeated erasure takes a toll, even when no one is intentionally being unkind. You are constantly being watched and very rarely being seen."
Riot Productions is all about making women seen. It's an intersectional feminist collective amplifying women’s voices through characters that have arc and agency rather than perfection.
"We want to tell stories of women in their failures and their flaws, and their struggles and all the things that we overcome that don't necessarily have to do with how we are limited to only being women who are wives and mothers and sisters and girlfriends, but in how we triumph and overcome on our own," said LeClair, who is co-founder of the company. "So we're always looking for those kinds of stories where we are at the center of that story but can show women who swear and are promiscuous and are unfaithful that they don't have to fit this plastic Barbie doll mold. I think that's what we're trying to do. We don't have to find a safe path."
McAfee is drawn to writers like LeClair who "treat their characters with curiosity rather than judgment, and Sarah always does that. I think that moral complexity is really, really rich to direct because it asks everyone — the actors and myself and the audience — to lean into that nuance and that contradiction and to face these uncomfortable truths."
This year they are facing those truths from the stage of Moxie Theatre, a perfect partner for telling stories about women. Until this season, Riot Productions had been a nomadic company but they received a grant that has given them at least a temporary home at Moxie.
"Just to be in a familiar space that feels like home is so welcoming," LeClair said. "It's just been such a delight to be able to take that stress off of having to find places this year."
There are four performances of "Audition Sides" this weekend at Moxie Theater.
