STUDENT DIRECTOR & ACTOR INTERVIEWS
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

In the Fall of 2012 I had the opportunity to teach Directing I and Acting I in the same semester. In the second half of the semester the student actors and student directors operated as a combined theatre company. The conceit was that AUC had hired these young theatre makers to produce two 'festivals' of ten-minute plays.

For the first series of plays the student directors chose their own scripts - contingent upon the Artistic Director's (i.e my) approval. They held auditions and met as a group to cast their individual plays as might happen at the beginning of the season of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, for example.

After the second series of plays were cast I reassigned the student directors so that no one would be working on a play they had submitted or with a cast they had chosen. This was done to simulate the real-world working situations where a director may be hired to work on a play he or she did not choose with actors he or she had no say in casting.

The following are some interviews with student actors and directors during the process of mounting this second series of 10-minute plays. This interview project was developed in conjunction with Professor Art Gardener and were conducted by graduate students of the AUC School of Journalism.