Auditions

The Suffield Players are an inclusive, non-profit community theater company. We regularly perform at historic Mapleton Hall on Mapleton Avenue in Suffield.

Audition information will be published on our website and Facebook pages, and announced via e-mail to anyone who has signed up to receive our notices.

Auditions are generally cold readings from the script; musicals will request prepared songs as outlined in the director notes. If a monologue, movement, improv, or other specific elements are to be included in the process, we will provide ample notice.

Links to our upcoming auditions are shown below. Please note that all auditioners must follow the Suffield Players Covid safety protocols. Please refer to the main page of this website for the most up-to-date requirements.

For the Page-to-Stage readings, we maintain a list of people interested in participating—make sure to indicate your interest on any audition form or on our membership interest form. You will automatically be entered and considered by directors as readings are determined.

Angel Street

June 28 and 30 @ 7PM, (Sunday and Tuesday)

Callbacks on July 1

Performances: October 9, 10, 11*, 16, 17, 18*, 23, and 24, at 8 pm (*2 pm Matinee)

No Monologues Required. Auditioners will be doing cold readings from the script.

Audition Details

20th Century Blues by Susan Miller Directed by Konrad Rogowski

Four women meet once a year for a ritual photo shoot, chronicling their changing (and aging) selves as they navigate love, careers, children, and the complications of history. But when these private photographs threaten to go public, relationships are tested, forcing the women to confront who they are and how they’ll deal with whatever lies ahead. 20th Century Blues is a sharply funny and evocative play by Obie Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winner Susan Miller that questions our place in the world and with one another.

General Description of Characters: The four main characters are all women in their 60’s. These are funny, passionate, complicated women, each of whom brings a unique history, as well as pressing current concerns, to the table. The often fast-paced rhythm of their dialogue should suggest that they talk in ways only people who know one another well can, even though individually they have different levels of comfort, intimacy, and friction with one another. They are not “polite” in their interactions, nor should their genuine connection to each other fall into the trap of sentimentality. Sometimes the lid blows off. At a cost.

Individual characters:

DANNY. Attractive, great sense of humor, with an artist’s energy and wild strain. Layered with urban angst and a dose of self-doubt. Divorced. Has a grown son, Simon. She’s an accomplished, well-known photographer at a crucial turning point in her life.
SIL. A real estate agent. Separated from her husband. She works her ass off to keep current. And to keep afloat.
MAC. A high-level journalist. African American. She is witty, smart, opinionated. Lives with her female partner.
GABBY. A dedicated veterinarian running her own practice. She lives in Boston with her one and only husband. She doesn’t do well with conflict, and wants everyone to be “okay.”
BESS. Danny’s mother, 91. In no way is she a generic “old” woman. She is modern and loving, with former talents of her own, though she is now in the early stages of dementia.
SIMON. Danny’s son, early 30s. Smart, sense of humor. He works for a progressive cable/internet news program. He is close with his mother and grandmother.

Presented by special arrangement with Broadway Licensing LLC servicing The Dramatists Play Service Collection (www.dramatists.com)

Copies of the play will be available at the Kent Memorial Library, starting Friday, January 16.

Angel Street (Gaslight) by Patrick Hamilton, directed by Krystle Bernier.
Audition dates: June 28 and 30, (Sunday and Tuesday), starting at 7PM. Callbacks will be on July 1.

Performances: October 9, 10, 11*, 16, 17, 18*, 23, and 24, at 8 pm (*2 pm Matinee)

Angel Street (Gaslight) is a psychological thriller and the work that gave the modern world the term "gaslighting."

Set in fog-bound London in 1880, the play takes place almost entirely within the upper middle-class home of Jack and Bella Manningham, where small, strange things keep happening. Objects disappear. Sounds come from rooms that should be empty. And the gaslights, inexplicably, keep dimming.

Jack has an explanation for all of it. He always does.

As Bella's grip on her own reality begins to loosen, she begins to suspect that something—or someone—in the shadows of her own home is responsible for her unraveling. When an unexpected ally arrives with a story that reframes everything, the truth turns out to be darker than she imagined. And far more dangerous.

Madness, it turns out, was never what she had to fear.

A Note on This Production:

Angel Street is set in the 1880s, and we will honor that world and time period fully. But our approach to this story will be through a more modern lens and rooted in what the play is actually about: the quiet, deliberate erosion of a woman's sense of reality.

Gaslighting, as we understand it today, is not hysteria. It is not melodrama. It is subtle, incremental, and maddeningly difficult to name—and that is exactly how we intend to stage it. This production will lean fully into its genre as a psychological thriller; one that audiences will recognize, uncomfortably, as something very present and very real even in today's world.

No Monologues Required. Auditioners will be doing cold readings from the script.

Bella Manningham
Age: Late 30s to early 40s. Almost regal in the way she holds herself outwardly to others, but is grappling internally with the quiet erosion of years under Jack’s control.
Synopsis: A woman of genuine intelligence, will, and presence who has been so systematically gaslit by her husband that she has begun to doubt her own sanity. The play is fundamentally the story of her reclamation (not rescue); the return of a self that was always there.
Accent: Received Pronunciation (“posh” British accent).

Jack Manningham
Age: Early to mid 40s. Meticulously put-together; a man who invests in his own appearance as part of his method.
Synopsis: The antagonist, but never the obvious villain in the room. A man of extraordinary charm and cold intelligence who has constructed an entire domestic system of control around his wife, dismantling her sense of reality methodically. He believes his own justifications entirely and conceitedly, which makes him considerably more dangerous than a self-aware villain.
Accent: Received Pronunciation (“posh” British accent).

Inspector Rough
Age: Mid to late 40s. Gruff but warm and approachable, in a lived-in way; the precise contrast to Jack Manningham’s carefully maintained appearance.
Synopsis: The catalyst and counterweight of the play. A former Scotland Yard inspector who has been tracking Jack Manningham for years and arrives at the house with his own agenda that happens to align with Bella’s salvation. He is not a romantic hero. He is a professional with warmth, and the external validation he brings begins Bella’s reclamation of reality.
Accent: Scottish, perhaps Irish. Must be distinguishable from the Manninghams.

Nancy
Age: Mid to late 20s. Young enough that her confidence reads as boldness rather than experience; mature enough that her agency in the relationship with Manningham is apparent.
Synopsis: The housemaid whose relationship with Jack Manningham is the play’s most morally complex subplot. In this production, she is not a victim of his predation but a woman who has identified the one leverage point available to her and is using it consciously. Her clarity about the household (un-gaslit, clear-eyed) contrasts sharply with Bella’s enforced confusion. She understands the game better than anyone in the house, including Jack Manningham.
Accent: Cockney/ South London — look to real life or film examples rather than theatrical. She is clever, not comical.

Elizabeth
Age: Late 40s to early 60s. The steadiness of someone who has learned to read rooms quickly and act without drawing attention to herself.
Synopsis: Bella’s housemaid and the play’s quiet moral anchor. Elevated in this production from functional character to genuine ally through her early witnessing of Bella’s internal struggle which creates a covenant of loyalty that ripples throughout the play. Warm but not soft, practical but not cold, with a fully inhabited interior life that the audience only glimpses through her scenes.
Accent: Lancashire/ Northern England. Perhaps Cockney but should be distinct in some way from Nancy.

Audition dates for the Holiday Benefit 2025, Eight Ways to Survive the Holidays by Don Zolidis,
directed by Becca Coolong, Mary Fernandez-Sierra, Konrad Rogowski, and Kelly Seip:
October 12, 13 at 7PM.

Roles for 20+ M and F, ages 16 and up
Auditions from Cold Reading of Scripts, No Monologues
Online Audition Paperwork Process Available—see the following:

Directions for Online Auditioner Paperwork:

Contact Konrad Rogowski to obtain the two writeable online audition forms, which will be emailed to you.
Download and save these forms as Word documents, type in your responses, save again and e-mail both as attachments to Konrad, who will share with the rest of the Holiday Benefit Directors.
The deadline for sending in your two e-forms to Konrad is: Sunday, October 5, 2025. Do send along a simple headshot, if available!

Note: You can also fill out your audition forms in person
on either of the Audition Evenings.

Questions? Comments? Please email Konrad Rogowski, Director, or Mary Fernandez-Sierra, Producer.
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Auditions

Angel Street

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