<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3Dd1B4_11K8vQIQ00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3Dd1B4_11K8vQIQ00" width="1179" height="1341" ><figcaption>Photo Courtesy of Castor Feinberg</figcaption></figure>After four years of training, the senior actors of the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and the College of Performing Arts have made their first steps into the professional world. The BFA Actor Showcase happens every spring, at which graduating seniors perform a monologue and a scene first in front of friends and family, and then in front of industry professionals, with the intention of being signed to an agent by the end of the event. Mae Montgomery, a senior theater performance major, said the BFA actor showcase was something she was looking forward to before she began attending Chapman.“It was a full circle moment for a lot of us; I know that one of the big reasons I chose to attend Chapman was because of the promise of a showcase at the end,” said Montgomery. “I remember watching the showcase my freshman year, wondering how I was going to be able to do that.” The Panther spoke with four actors about their experience as seniors at the yearly showcase and the work that they performed.“We all wrote our own material based on what we wanted to showcase to the industry,” said senior screen acting major Castor Feinberg. “So we've been working on that; starting last semester, we kind of all nailed down what we were going to do.”Feinberg’s performance took many different paths before she solidified it and presented it to the world. She said she had a few scenes that she liked when she started writing, but as she kept editing, the final product was completely different than when she started“My scene is kind of like a coming-of-age love, kind of two old friends reminiscing about their childhood, and then they both have feelings for each other,” said Feinberg. “My monologue was about having a hard time breaking up with someone I've been with for two years, who's treated me really badly, but I was afraid to leave him. So this was kind of, like, my breaking up with him.” The Actor Showcase marked Feinberg’s first time performing live in front of an audience since high school. Since coming to college, she has been focusing more on screen acting rather than theater performance.“It was honestly really refreshing to perform live in front of an audience,” Feinberg told The Panther. “That kind of made me realize how I missed that.” For Eliana Moore, a senior theater performance major, one of the most difficult parts of preparing for the Actor Showcase was writing her own material.“I would say that (the preparation) started junior year. We have a class called (The Actor Process: From Rehearsal to Performance) with one of our favorite teachers, Nick Gabriel. We workshop a ton of different material, especially because a lot of us, myself included, were very, very nervous about the writing aspect of it,” said Moore.For Moore, the looming pressure of the showcase has been with her since she was a freshman, and her classes have stressed the importance of preparing for the event.“It's kind of overwhelming that over the last four years, because they say since freshman year (that) your showcase is your last four years, and all the training you've had here at Chapman,” said Moore. “It's kind of, like, almost seeming like an impossible feat to compile all the training we've gotten into three minutes' worth of material.”Condensing four years of intensive training into a brief performance wasn’t easy, but Moore aimed to highlight the full range of what she had learned at Chapman.“I did a monologue with my friend's dad, actually, about leaving home, and the struggles of maybe not connecting on an emotional level with a parent and the pressures to kind of rectify that at the last minute when we're standing in the driveway before we leave,” Moore told The Panther.“And then I did a scene called ‘Coffee or Tea?’ with my friend Finn. It's kind of like a meet-cute in a coffee shop, and I like coffee, and he likes tea, and we end up sitting down and hitting it off and stereotyping each other because of our drink preferences.” During this past academic year, preparing for the showcase has been a healthy mix of learning the creative side of the industry and the business side for senior screen acting major Nora Schultz.“So we've been working on it for several months, and through the help of our thesis professor, Tom Provost, who is also a writer and director as well as an actor. So he really helped us workshop the monologues and the scenes,” Schultz said. “And Russell Boast, who is our ‘Business of Acting’ professor and the co-head of this acting program, helped us with all the business sides.” The actors didn’t just learn how to write their monologues; according to Shultz, Boast taught them how to build resumes and set up meetings and their IMDb pages. For the performance, Schultz gained inspiration for her scene from a play she did several years ago called “Bench Seat” by Neil LaBute.“So the scene I wrote was about these two people. They're on a second date, and they slowly start revealing to one another the crazy things that they did to their exes. It becomes a competition,” said Schultz. “Then the monologue I wrote (was) about a girl who is giving a toast (at) her little sister’s engagement party, and it turns into this whole downward spiral (and)crash out about her own relationship, because she's been with her boyfriend for over six years, and her younger sister has gotten engaged after just a couple months.”To Mae Montgomery, the most rewarding part of the whole experience was being able to watch her classmates perform work that was so authentically themselves.Montgomery wrote and performed a scene called “Sheep Snatcher” and also presented a monologue called “Raisinets”. Her biggest takeaway from the whole experience was to always be yourself."Don't try to cater to what you think the industry wants or try to make yourself more palatable to a specific audience,” she said. “People will be interested in what makes you unique and different from others, so don't try to blend in.” </div></body>

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After four years of training, the senior actors of the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and the College of Performing Arts have made their first steps into the professional world. The BFA Actor Showcase happens every spring, at which graduating seniors perform a monologue and a scene first...

The final bow: Seniors perform at the BFA Actor Showcase

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After four years of training, the senior actors of the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and the College of Performing Arts have made their first steps 

The final bow: Seniors perform at the BFA Actor Showcase

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