Adds Kubzansky, "Actors sitting around watching their partners lose patience, so I'm switching them back and forth, making it that much harder to cement a scene — though when they're really paying attention, it's great."
Kubzansky does stress the luminous history, brains and talent inside the Antaeus company, "and it is exciting to mix it all up with different chemistries of different actors."
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Like Kubzanksy and DeLorenzo, Stangl is a regional theater director not in the Antaeus company, but she's more of a fan of the process than they are.
"I'm definitely an enthusiast of partner casting," says Stangl, who directed Antaeus' Peace in Our Time in 2011. "Scheduling rehearsals was hell, but I found it makes the actors collaborators in a way that's not just in their own cause but being aware of the whole wheel. They're always stepping out and watching themselves inside it."
Stangl adds that she deliberately tried to cast actors who were not carbon copies of each other, "so you could get different takes on the role. It works at Antaeus because they're a company, they know each other. It demands a certain generosity of spirit and egolessness and confidence — the ability to be confident in what you're doing and watch somebody else and feel you don't have to copy them."
Brochtrup, the co-artistic director, recalls a line from Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden, which the company presented in 2010. Mrs. Mary Ellis says to her grandson's now ex-fiancée: "Well. If there is ever a chance, come and see me."
Broochtrup explains, "When Dawn Didawick said the line, it was full of sweet Southern poison, like a knife in the back. When her partner, Anne Gee Byrd, said it, the line was full of sorrow, as if she had lost a daughter. One line, so different, made the entire play take on a different shade."
Brochtrup cautions, "On ... occasions there will be personalities that don't mesh well. But we're finding the more we do it, we're refining ways to handle that early on. Now so many people have done it and had a good experience, so everyone is now kind of on board with how we do it. We've seen no personality conflict in a couple of years. We like to think we're getting better at it."
A double-cast production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It With You, directed by Gigi Bermingham, starts previews Oct. 11 at Antaeus Company, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd. For more information, see antaeus.org.
