Auditions and Casting

Auditioned 15-20 actors for the performance. Cast 3 women and 2 men. The audition consisted of a more-or-less informal conversation and some very basic directed improv movement and object work. No prepared monologues or sides. Directions were as follows:

1) Actor wants to convince a table (placed on one side of the room) to go to bed with him/her. (MOTIVATION)
2) Actor has a stool (placed on the opposite side of the room) to assist in the seduction of the table. (OBJECT)
3) With the above in mind, actor must move the stool next to the table. (TASK)

Needless to say, there were some very creative and memorable performances. Some rather awkward moments as well. It was a real challenge for all the actors, as I hoped it would be. I think I pulled together a pretty good group. All of them demonstrated, in various ways, that they were willing to take risks and experiment. I'm looking forward to working with all of them.

What is a Bachelor Machine?

It is an impossible perpetual motion machine, an absurd and perverse assemblage of sexuality and technology. It is that structure of desire which both sexually stimulates the body and indefinitely suspends expenditure (i.e. the moment of climax). It is the grotesquely narcissistic pursuit of a perfect masculine body, the hedonistic philosophy of pleasure purely for pleasure's sake (minus any notion of function or utility whatsoever), the deferral and defeat of any and all procreative impulse, the accelerated rhythm of pistons somehow unaffected by the physical laws of friction and entropy, outmoded technology fused to beautiful flesh, the triumph of useless-value, "that guy" at the muscle beach and the discotheque.

But most of all, the Bachelor Machine is the intersection of the performing body with the apparatus of the stage, the persistent desire of the audience for climax and closure melded to a refusal and deferral of it all.

And so, in a darkened theater, the Bachelor Machine whirs to life. We listen to its heartbeat mechanism, shifting into overdrive, becoming more than the sum of its parts, humming in resonances that recall electropop tunes--those famous songs of men who loved their synthesizers and drum machines like their women: coldly, with calculation and restraint, electric semen scintillating in the circuitry, never released, always held in absolute abeyance. Reserved.