MACH 33 Festival
Saturday, April 11, 5:00-7:30pm
TACIT House (275 S Hill Ave)
Rehearsals: May 1-12
Festival dates: May 13-16
Join us Saturday April 11th at 5:00–7:30pm for a relaxed, collaborative audition. Please prepare a short monologue (about 1 minute). It does not need to be memorized.
We’ll start by hearing everyone’s monologue, and then move into working with sides from the plays. You may be asked to read with different partners as directors explore combinations. There’s time to step into other rooms or outside spaces to run lines and try things out together.
We’ll have snacks, and there’s space to talk, connect, and get to know each other. This is as much about building a strong, generous ensemble as it is about casting individual roles. The goal is a room where people enjoy working together and feel excited about the process.
Come ready to play, collaborate, and meet new people!
If you’d like to learn more about the MACH 33 program, read more or see below for synopses of this year’s plays.
If you are unable to attend auditions, please film yourself reading your selected one-minute piece and email it to coleremmen@caltech.edu. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
MACH 33 Winners
The Heat of the Sun’s Rays
by Katherine Vondy
directed by Jessie Lee Mills
Science Advisors: Olivia Alcabes and Zhaoyi Shen
In ancient Greece, Cassandra has visions of what is going to happen during the Trojan War. In 19th-century London, a group of academics gathers to discuss the world’s latest scientific developments. And in 2024 Phoenix, a young woman and her grandmother grapple with a historic Arizonan heat wave. What strange thread unites these faraway people, places, and times? Only the groundbreaking work of early American climatologist Eunice Newton Foote can reveal the connection.
Haunt Me
by James Still
directed by Abigail Desler
Science Advisor: Solvin Sigurdson
Dementia Advisor: Anna Schlobohm de Cruder
Best-selling horror writer Ellery du Trent begins to disappear into the novel she’s writing, with the unsettling assistance of an AI program called MUSE. Haunt Me is an intimate psychological horror where fiction and reality slowly blur, revealing how memory, identity, and creation can slip away when the stories we tell seem to take on a life of their own.
Sing for Me
by Cris Eli Blak
directed by Melissa Coleman-Reed
Science Advisor: Tinashe Handina
A rising Black musician is offered stardom, on one condition: her voice will be heard, but her face will be replaced by an AI-generated white avatar. Sing for Me, a new Cris Eli Blak play, interrogates who gets seen, who gets paid, and what survival costs in an industry built on extraction.
Launchpad Winners
River of Night
by Randal K. Jackson
directed by Cole Remmen
Science Advisor: Prof. John Preskill
River of Night explores one of the most profound scientific turning points of the twentieth century: the realization that the universe extends far beyond our own galaxy. Set on Mount Wilson Observatory in the 1920s and 30s, the play brings Edwin Hubble, Milton Humason, and Albert Einstein to life against a backdrop of political upheaval and the rise of fascism in Europe.
Redshift
by Simon Bowler
directed by Kevin Delin
Science Advisor: Prof. Alan J. Weinstein
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, an eccentric and brilliant astronomer, challenges mankind’s assumptions about the structure of the universe. Despite fierce opposition, he and Einstein prove that the universe is infinite and is expanding. A tense drama, Redshift explores ambition, doubt, and the courage to overturn—and then question—one’s own truths.
Parity
by Howard Ho
directed by Sandra Tsing Loh
Science Advisor: Prof. Cliff Cheung
Parity was a law of physics until a Chinese American woman at Columbia University in the 1950s disproved it against all odds. This is the true story of Chien-Shiung Wu 吴健雄 AKA the First Lady of Physics and the Queen of Nuclear Research. The only ceiling she cared about was our understanding of the universe, but along the way she broke through many more.
