STAGE WEST: Riot Productions' "Audition Sides"

Sarah Alida LeClair and Timothy Benson co-star in "Audition Sides."    Photo courtesy of Riot Productions

            You could say that Sarah Alida LeClair’s “Audition Sides” is about two potentially terrifying experiences. One, auditioning for a part. Two, being thrown together with an-ex lover … when you both are married to someone else.
            So there’s no paucity of tension in this 65-minute piece first seen onstage during the 2024 San Diego International Film Festival.
            LeClair just wound up a three-performance engagement of “Audition Sides” at Moxie Theatre directed by Rhiannon McAfee. The Rolando space will be the production home this year for Riot Productions, for which LeClair is artistic director.
            Hopefully “Audition Sides,” which explores the audition process in all its heavy anxiety and, come to think of it, relationships in all their heavy anxiety, will see another stage one day now that the brief Moxie staging has concluded. For anyone in theater, it’s undoubtedly relatable. (I could tell from the reactions of some people in the Sunday matinee audience.). For others, the complexities of love, which are many, quickly become the thrust of the story.
            LeClair (as The Woman) and Timothy Benson, who plays The Man, find themselves as audition partners, but we soon learn that their interpersonal history runs far deeper. The stopping-and-starting of the scene they’re rehearsing turns out to be just a pretext for an escalating confrontation about their past romance, their present circumstances and whatever future they might share … as friends, as lovers, as nothing at all.
            Comic relief is provided by Josalyn Johnson as the audition proctor who, to the actors/lovers’ irritation, becomes part of the drama whether they like it or not.
            The auditioning couple’s interactions run the gamut from anger to tenderness, a reflection certainly of so many people’s navigations of love especially when they’re roiled by injured feelings, miscommunication and uncertainty.
            LeClair has said that the premise for “Audition Sides” stemmed from her understanding of the fraught but enduring romance between 19th-century musician Clara Schumann (wife of Robert) and composer Johannes Brahms. As LeClair called them in the “Audition Sides” program notes “two people who in their brilliance and artistic hearts were isolated in the world and had found each other at a moment when it made no sense to be together, too broken to find a way, searching for other forms of love and stability in their lives but who would truly never find what they had in each other with anybody else.”
            Maybe The Woman and The Man in the audition room had it easy by comparison.