AUDITION NOTICE

I’M NOT RAPPAPORT

By Herb Gardner

Directed by Mark Ivan Branche

August 22, 2-4 pm and

August 23, 7-9 pm

Please prepare a 1-2 minute contemporary monologue for the audition. Readings from the script will be provided as well. To schedule an audition, please submit a resume and headshot to Director Mark Ivan Branche at aking2.pta@gmail.com .

Performance Dates:  November 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22

Rehearsals:  Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday Evenings starting in September

Tech Week November 8, 9, 10 and 11

All rehearsals and performances are held at the Twentieth Century Club in Lansdowne, a 5 minute walk from the Lansdowne station on the Media/Wawa Line

About the Play:

Herb Gardner’s 1986 Tony Award–winning comedy turns on two octogenarians who meet daily on a Central Park bench, determined to fight off every attempt to put them out to pasture. The cast is small — seven roles — and built around the magnetic friction between Nat and Midge, with the remaining five characters arriving to test, threaten, or expose them. The title comes from an old vaudeville routine in which a man insists, against all evidence of how much he has changed, “I’m Not Rappaport”.

Character Descriptions

Nat Moyer  :

Age / Type:  Octogenarian Caucasion Male; the play’s protagonist and engine.

Casting Note:  Actor age 50-75, able to play 80’s.  Verbally dexterous leading man; rapid-fire comic timing under genuine pathos.

Nat is the engine of the play: an 81-year-old Jewish New Yorker, a lifelong radical and labor organizer whose politics run from socialist to outright communist, and a self-described “world-class kibitzer.” His defining trait is fabulation. He doesn’t merely tell stories — he becomes other people, slipping into elaborate invented identities: a Cuban revolutionary, a high-powered attorney named Donald Meyers, an undercover agent, a Mafia figure.

Beneath the bluster is real vulnerability. His eyesight and body are failing, his daughter is closing in, and his grand narratives are also a way of refusing to be alone. He is exhausting, manipulative, dishonest, and magnificent — a man who would rather risk everything than be diminished into someone smaller.

Midge Carter:

Age / Type:  Octogenarian, African-American Male; the deuteragonist and emotional ballast of the play.

Casting Note: Actor age 50-75, able to play 80’s.  Dry, grounded, guarded warmth; plays near-blindness with dignity, not pity.

Midge is Nat’s foil and reluctant partner — an octogenarian African American man who has worked for decades as the superintendent of an apartment building on Central Park West, and who is now half-blind, his vision failing badly enough that he can barely read his newspaper. Where Nat performs and provokes, Midge wants to disappear. He spends his days in the park hiding in the past and hiding from his disgruntled tenants, because being noticed means being pushed out of the job that gives his life structure and dignity.

He is cautious, dry, deeply private, and weary of trouble — and Nat is nothing but trouble. He carries the play’s most grounded emotional weight. His survival has been quieter and more endured than Nat’s, and his fear of being “retired” out of existence is one of the work’s central anxieties.

Clara Gelber:

Age / Type:  40-50 Female, a social worker.

Casting Note:  Loving exasperation; must land as caretaker, not antagonist.

Clara is Nat’s adult daughter, a social worker, and the human face of the pressure to “manage” the elderly. She loves her father but is worn thin by him — by the lies, the schemes, the near-arrests, the refusal to behave like a safe old man. She wants him relocated somewhere supervised, where he can be looked after and kept out of danger, and she frames this as care, which it partly is.

The play uses her to dramatize one of its core tensions: the difficulty of dealing with adult children who think they know what is best for their parents. Clara is not a villain; she is a daughter caught between genuine worry and genuine exasperation, and her confrontations with Nat are among the most painful in the play precisely because both of them are partly right.

Danforth:

Age / Type:  40-50 Male; chairman of the building’s tenants’ committee.

Casting Note:  Well-meaning, bloodless bureaucrat; comic discomfort as Nat outmaneuvers him.

Danforth is the chairman of the tenants’ committee at Midge’s building, and he arrives in the park to deliver the news that the tenants have voted to retire Midge — to pension him off and replace him with a modern service. He is younger, well-meaning in a bloodless way, and acutely uncomfortable doing what he has come to do.

He represents impersonal, bureaucratic decency: no malice, just process — the kind of polite institutional machinery that quietly removes inconvenient people. His scene gives Nat one of his best showcases, as Nat poses as a fearsome lawyer to bluff and bully Danforth into backing down, turning the bureaucrat’s own timidity against him.

Gilley:

Age / Type:  20-30’s Male; antagonist.

Casting Note:  Physical menace and casual cruelty; the literal danger in the park.

Gilley is a young street tough who runs a protection racket in the park, shaking down the elderly and vulnerable for money. He embodies the predatory urban menace running through the play — the literal danger that lurks for old people. He is the kind of threat Clara is afraid of, and his presence raises the stakes of Nat and Midge’s insistence on staying out in the world rather than retreating to safety.

The Cowboy:

Age / Type:  20-30’s Male; a drug dealer and enforcer; antagonist.

Casting Note:  Smoother and more sinister than Gilley; preys on the young.

The Cowboy is a drug dealer — and the muscle behind it — who is pursuing Laurie over money she owes him. He is another face of the city’s danger, more sinister than Gilley because he preys specifically on the young woman the old men try to protect.

Laurie:

Age / Type:  20-30’s Female; an artist.

Casting Note:  Vulnerable, modern, in over her head; the next generation in jeopardy.

Laurie is a young artist who works in the park and has fallen into debt to the Cowboy. She is the play’s representative of the next generation — vulnerable, struggling, and in over her head. Nat’s impulse to rescue her is both heroic and reckless, and she functions partly as the object of his protective fantasy and partly as a reminder that the dangers the old men face are not theirs alone. Through her, Gardner extends the play’s concern beyond aging to the broader fragility of anyone trying to survive in an indifferent city.

Thank you for your interest.