Actors sought for new cable series
Acclaimed Memphis-born playwright Katori Hall is hoping to find local actresses to star in an upcoming cable television drama series she has created for the Starz network.
Auditions will be held Friday and Saturday for the four lead roles in the series, set in a Mississippi Delta strip club called the Pink Pony. Based on a play by Hall, the currently untitled series is scheduled to begin shooting in September.
“I want to make sure we get some real Southern flavor in the mix,” said Hall, the artistic director at Midtown’s Hattiloo Theatre, known for her award-winning, Lorraine Motel-set play about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Mountaintop,” and for “Tina,” a musical biography of Tina Turner now playing to packed houses in London’s famed West End theater district.
“This is an amazing opportunity for some local folks to shine,” said Hall, who grew up in Raleigh and followed Craigmont High School with Columbia University, Harvard drama school and the Juilliard playwriting program. (She also was a 2000 summer intern at The Commercial Appeal.)
To paraphrase Liam Neeson, performers on the Starz show will need a very particular set of skills (i.e., pole dancing), and also need to be least 18 years old. According to the requirements listed by Winsome Sinclair & Associates, the casting agency overseeing the auditions, “actors must be comfortable with: comedic and dramatic elements, nudity, sexual situations, pole dancing/stunts/athletics.”
The four lead parts include “Mercedes,” the “queen of the Pink Pony,” a mid-20s African-American “OG” and “enterprising hustler” who is “ready to hang up her lucites and start anew”; “Autumn Night,” a mid-20s African-American femme fatale who is described as “a perfectly polished beauty with a dark secret tucked deep in her Louis Vuitton bag” and “a mysterious shape-shifter blessed with the privilege society bestows up on ‘light-skinned-ed‘”; naive young AfricanAmerican mother “Miss Mississippi,” a “natural riot” whose determination “to be Insta-famous like Cardi B and Blac Chyna“is often undercut by the presence of her “abusive boo”; and a Caucasian early-20s “trailerpark philosopher” and “second-generation pole-dancer” WEDNESDAY, JULY 4, 2018 called “Gidget.”
“To me, the show is not really about stripping, it’s about identity and performance,” Hall has said of the series. She said the program will ask: “Can this place of exploitation be a place of empowerment for women who are often marginalized?”
The official summary of the promises that the program will tell “the kaleidoscopic story of this littlestrip-club-that-could and the big characters who come through its doors — the hopeful, the lost, the broken, the ballers, the beautiful, and the damned. Trap music meets film noir in this lyrical and atmospheric series that dares to ask what happens when smalltown folk find the courage to dream beyond the boundaries of the Piggly-Wiggly and the pawn shop...”
Hall said casting auditions will be held in multiple cities, but she said she hopes to find at least one of her stars in Memphis or the Mid-South because “I want it to be as authentic as possible.” She said the series likely will shoot interior scenes on sets in Atlanta, with exterior work in North Mississippi.
Auditions will be from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. by appointment only. Those interested in applying should email a head shot and résumé (if available) to wsa.pilotcasting@gmail.com.