About Graduate Repertory
TAPS’s Annual Grad Rep presents directorial works by TAPS’s second-year PhD students in the Nitery Theater over two weekends in February. Presented in rep, these roughly hour-long pieces are selected/created by the graduate students to explore their areas of interest in performance-making and provide undergraduate actors, designers, and crew members with student collaborations in the exploration of theory-led practice.
Stanford TAPS seeks to build a diverse cast for this production and encourages members of any race, gender identity, and ability to audition. If any accessibility accommodations are needed please email tapsinformation [at] stanford.edu for assistance.
In addition to its scheduled performances, this production may be live-streamed or recorded for public viewing.
Design Positions
In addition to performers, all four Grad Rep pieces are looking for designers, assistants, and support crew, all of whom can be involved in multiple pieces in the same or various positions. Apply via our Design/Crew applications here:
About the Productions
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY SIXTUS CHETACHI IGBOKWE
READ THE PLAY | Once Upon a Fool in April follows a day in the life of a Nigerian senator, Senator Osondu Ike. On April 1 morning, Ike decides to play a fool’s day trick on his favorite kinsman and praise-singer, Uzo-Kolota. His prank reveals Uzo-Kolota’s true thoughts about the lawmaker.
The Audition Side is available in the side column under “Important Resources.”
ABOUT THE PROCESS
Two workshops with actors and designers will take place in the Fall. And rehearsals will begin properly in Winter. 15-hour rehearsal per week. Fridays excluded.
SEEKS TO CAST
- SENATOR OSONDU IKE: Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, male
- UZO-KOLOTA: His favorite kinsman, male
- EKWUREKWU: His long-term steward and nurse, female
- AGAMEFU: His new steward, male
QUESTIONS ABOUT ONCE UPON A FOOL IN APRIL?
ABOUT SIXTUS CHETACHI IGBOKWE
Sixtus Chetachi Igbokwe is a Nigerian playwright, theatremaker, and PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the University of Iowa and a BA in English and Literary Studies from the University of Nigeria, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of The Muse, West Africa’s oldest student journal, founded by Chinua Achebe in 1963. He is also a 2019 alumnus of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop.
His plays, which often explore family and cultural memory through African-Igbo epistemologies, have been developed or staged in Nigerian theatres and at the University of Iowa. His writing has appeared in The English Academy Review, The Hopkins Review, and other publications. He received the 2021 Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize for Drama, was longlisted for the 2023 Nigeria Prize for Literature, and was a semi-finalist for the 2024 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
Igbokwe’s scholarly research focuses on African and Black diaspora theatre, with particular emphasis on Nigerian performance traditions, Igbo folkloric aesthetics, popular comedy, and the representation of disability and minoritized identities in performance.
WRITTEN BY SAM SHEPARD AND PATTI SMITH
DIRECTED BY FIONA SELMI
READ THE PLAY | A woman who looks like a crow kidnaps a man who looks like a cat dressed like a coyote and holds him hostage in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. Her demand? Become a rockstar. Written by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith during their own brief and chaotic love affair, Cowboy Mouth is a one-act collision of sex, violence, rock and roll, and two people desperately trying to make themselves into something bigger than they are. Part love story, part hostage situation, part rockstar origin myth, the play asks what it takes to become an icon—and what gets destroyed in the process.
The piece includes foul language, depictions of intimacy, and violence. Actors will be asked to sing, and experience playing musical instruments is a plus.
COWBOY MOUTH is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French, Inc.
ABOUT THE PROCESS
In the fall quarter, there will be workshops for both actors and designers, focused on collaboratively creating the world of the play, consisting of about 10 hours of total commitment during the fall quarter and scheduled based on creative team availability. Rehearsals in the winter quarter will be approximately 15 hours a week, with performances in Week 4 or 5.
My practice as a director is rooted in experimental, DIY, and spectacle-forward theater, and much of my directing work has been with the theater company Live Animals Onstage! I’m excited to bring the collaborative spirit of that work to Cowboy Mouth, particularly in creating the world of the play alongside the actors and designers in the room. Rehearsals will involve close text work alongside physical experimentation, with particular attention to the play’s relationship to live music, rock and roll, and performance.
SEEKS TO CAST
- LOBSTER MAN!
- Understudies for CAVALE and SLIM
QUESTIONS ABOUT/INTERESTED IN AUDITIONING FOR COWBOY MOUTH?
Email Fiona Selmi fselmi [at] stanford.edu with a copy of your resume/experience to arrange an interview.
ABOUT FIONA SELMI
Fiona Selmi is a dramaturg, writer, director and theater practitioner originally from Washington DC. Before arriving at Stanford to pursue her PhD in Theater and Performance Studies, she was the assistant to the head of Theater at United Talent Agency. Previously, she was the Artistic Fellow at Playwrights Horizons and the Manager of the Emerging Playwrights Fund at Audible Theater. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of a devised, backyard theater company called Live Animals Onstage! which embraces a rock and roll ethos to subvert classic texts in an attempt to create theater that is joyous, experimental and ritualistic.
Fiona graduated from Williams College in 2021 with a BA in Theatre and Political Science, with a concentration in Political Theory. Her thesis, “Teenage Girls and Femme Futurities: An Investigation into Coalition Building through Contemporary Feminist Theater” explored the growing trend of “teenage girl plays” in conjunction with utopian performance theory and political theories of coalition and community building, earning her honors in the theatre department. Most recently, her essay on the re-emergence of realism in the contemporary American theater, “The Playwright as Bad Glazier,” was published in volume 34.3 of the Contemporary Theatre Review.
Her current research interests revolve around contemporary theater and playwriting with a specific emphasis on DIY aesthetics, self-production, alternative theater scenes and the re-emergence of the contemporary theater company and collective. Using her background in Marxist and Critical Theory, she hopes to use her research, intermixed with practice, to investigate collective-based producing models, with the intention of de-centering capital and bringing theater into direct conversation with the community.
Resources
Must be logged in via an @stanford.edu account to view
Accessibility
If any accessibility accommodations with auditions or callbacks are needed please email tapsinformation [at] stanford.edu for assistance.
Sponsors
This Repertory was made possible in part by the Pigott Fund for Drama and the May Ellen Ritter Production Fund.