Because costuming concerns more than formal/casual issues, the selection of clothing attire and accessories involves much more than a quick “dress-for-success” study. Costuming may involve any number of wardrobe decisions to help actors use attire to assume their roles. Consider the advisers of investment firm The Motley Fool, played by actor-directors David and Tom Gardner. The brothers' costumes consist of only one article of unusual clothing added to the traditional attire of trusted financiers: each wears a jester's hat. Older brother David explains the significance of the hat: “There's a war for your money out there. And the more I study it, the more I realize that the guys wearing the pinstripe suits—with all their complicated graphs and their numbers that don't have any context you can understand—aren't on my side, and they aren't on your side either. Indeed, if those guys are Wise—and that's what they call themselves, on TV and in all the glossy financial magazines—then we want to be Fools.”21 Consider, too, financial adviser Jim Cramer, host of the TV show Mad Money. Although he does not don any special article of clothing like the Gardner brothers' hats, Cramer forsakes a formal jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves—no less an act of costuming. No one using as many props for sound effects and visual effects as he does thinks any less intentionally about the costuming he wears.
Image is everything, in costuming as with other technical facets of design. The trend toward casual attire in the workplace opens up opportunities to create unique [theatre stages = workplaces] for staging engaging experiences, such as with investment advice from The Motley Fool. But relaxed standards of attire must be actively directed toward intentionally staged cues, lest relaxation itself become the new standard and roles become confused.
Stage Crews
Stage crews have one simple responsibility: to “ensure that everybody and everything is in its right place at the right time. They document every on-stage move by anybody or anything during the production. They must be calm in a crisis, patient with frayed tempers, and infinitely understanding of everyone's problems.”22 The crew must get the right sets, props, costumes, and even actors where and when they are needed so that the [performance = offering] goes off without a hitch. Ultimately, the members of the crew are logisticians. Whether a warehouse worker dispatching inventory to a distribution center or a housekeeper making a hotel bed, members of the crew must procure, maintain, transport, and shuttle the resources prescribed by the director, within a process outlined by the scriptwriter, using devices designed by the technicians.
In fulfilling this role, the stage crew must be both effective and efficient. They must richly attend to details with an intention all their own—in order to enhance the quality of the output. Without such precise care, a crew may turn a wonderfully conceived drama and a well-scripted strategy into an embarrassing performance. But the crew must also be careful not to drive up the cost of production by wasting money, people, or time. Crew members must roll up their sleeves and perform the backstage work that, more often than not, goes unnoticed and unappreciated.
The stage manager is responsible for ensuring that all goes according to plan. Stage managers must also track the performance—from issuing periodic reports to monitoring and tracking moment-to-moment movements. For platform and matching theatre, stage managers and their crews must document, document, document—institutionalizing how the ensemble runs the production so that each performance is repeatable. They must measure, measure, measure, since, as we all now know, what you don't measure, you can't manage. And they must stay out of the way when onstage actors prepare to enter, perform on, and finally exit the stage. Yet they must always be accessible, immediately on the scene when something goes awry.
Their tasks may seem thankless, but crew members should understand how significant these roles are to the overall offering. Stage crews, after all, run all the operational elements of production, the vehicles through which technical design adds value. Set design, props, and costuming exist to help bring the actors' unwritten subtext to life. For onstage actors to manifest such subtext, stage crews must make sure everything's in its place.
Consider how stage crews enabled the late president Ronald Reagan to capitalize masterfully on subtext for his White House news conference performances. Open doors to the East Room allowed cameras to see the Gipper emerge in the distance from a faraway room. He then purposefully made his way down the long, red-carpeted hallway to the platform, where one last hop up brought him to the podium. Julius Fast, a leading expert on the use of body language, said of Reagan's performance, “The subtext was communicated before he spoke: vigor, authority, ease.”23 And when he spoke, Reagan's attitude and style provided a compelling context for his words. His appeal—like that of all good actors—manifested itself not in how he said his lines but in what he meant when he said them. President Reagan's performances would have been impossible without a stage crew working behind the scenes to position cameras, place carpet, open doors, and signal Reagan onstage at the appropriate time. Frontline personnel—the onstage actors of any performance—cannot by themselves make all the necessary preparations to act their part. No actor is an island.
A Casting Call for Companies
To fully realize the Performance Model presented earlier in figure 8-1—providing an appropriate ensemble of actors, technicians, and stage crew members for each production created by directors, dramaturgs, and scriptwriters—the human resources department must become the casting director. Hiring candidates for jobs essentially becomes casting actors to fill [roles = responsibilities]. And this means significant change for the HR department. Any enterprise looking to stage experiences must discontinue its reliance on interviews as the dominant method of evaluation and must begin conducting auditions instead.
Words matter. Vocabulary affects behavior. Calling your offering an experience, your work theatre, and your interviews auditions will certainly bring about some movement in the right direction. But make no mistake: it will not be enough to sustain lasting improvement. HR departments, along with the producers and directors for whom they hire, must stage real auditions, for they present the principal means to gather information about how an actor will actually perform.
Most information gathered in traditional face-to-face interviews concerns actors as individuals; knowledge of their ability to perform (as well as their true desire to play a particular role) can be garnered only from auditions. Information gathering should be done, but only as a means to screen aspiring actors for participation in the auditioning process. Babson College president Leonard Schlesinger once described how the fast casual restaurant where he once worked as an executive effectively used auditions: “An integral part of the Au Bon Pain selection process is a paid two-day work experience in the stores prior to final selection interviews. This experience weeds out applicants both through self-selection and through management observation of behavior.”24
Several principles, then, govern auditions.25 First and foremost, companies must create places to conduct the simulations, role-playing, or live tests that constitute real auditions. With candidates no longer parading around interviewers' offices for a series of conversations, new venues need to be established—HR's internally staged experiences. Many consulting companies already put candidates in role-playing situations in real-world offices and team rooms; others should do the same. If you are staging auditions for a buyer role in the purchasing department, then have virtual vendors call on each prospective buyer, who is furnished with an office for the occasion. If you are auditioning for new bank tellers, set up a simulated counter or booth and have individuals process deposits, cut cashier's checks, and check balances. If you are in need of more call center representatives, set up a bank of phones to test how prospective reps field incoming calls. In every case, establish a place—perhaps even in the real customer place, as Au Bon Pain does—where you can observe the actor performing the intended role. The candidate need not act out the whole play before a full audience, only some important and revealing scenes for
those doing the hiring.
Next, if you're creating a specific place for auditions, strip it down to its essentials. Minimize props, deliberately remove features normally present in the real setting for the everyday role, and position the auditors in clear view of the applicant. Do this so that the unaided performance reveals the raw approach with which each individual tackles the role. Don't let the prospective buyer bring a briefcase full of notes. Keep the teller's station clear of instructions, policy memos, and other cheat sheets that may typically surround the computer monitor. Furnish the call center with only a phone and one image fixed on a computer screen. After all, as Barbra Streisand demonstrated, it doesn't matter whether the props are material or not, only whether the acting genuinely fits the role. Observing the essence of how each person characterizes the role and fits into the ensemble of actors guarantees that the audition will help identify candidates well suited for particular parts.
No less an experience stager than Disney uses such a place for auditions. Disney hired Robert A. M. Stern, a renowned postmodern architect who designed many of its facilities (including Disney's Celebration living experience), to create the company's Casting Center for auditioning prospective cast members for parts. As the Project on Disney described the facility, “Stern's Casting Center tells a story about what it means to work at Disney, or, as [Stern] says, ‘to clarify Disney's hiring process and give it an architectural dimension.’ By channeling potential employees along a ramp between carefully spaced murals that tell a story, Stern alludes to the effects of rides at Disney World; the procession through the building's architecture is itself a kind of ride, in which one learns the story of the park's secret: that all is illusion.”26 It's also the place where Disney observes how well each actor fits into a microcosm of its larger-scale fantasies.
Regardless of the particular experience being cast, refrain from singling out any one characterization that you think fits the role. A vast universe of possibilities exists, and no preconceived notion of right and wrong should eliminate prospects so early in the selection process. Accept the fact that not every person has had an adequate opportunity to build a complete [characterizations = representations]; there will be time for that after casting. Rather, consider how each individual might develop into the role.
Consider for a moment the world of baseball scouts, who enjoy the great luxury of auditioning players during actual performances. Yet even in these ideal circumstances, there are dos and don'ts. The late Tony Lucadello, generally considered baseball's greatest scout, visited high school diamonds in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan for fifty years in search of major league prospects, and in that tenure he signed more kids who eventually made it to The Show than any other scout—fifty in all, including Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. Lucadello noted four basic approaches that various scouts used to evaluate talent, which he called “the 4 P's.”27 The “poor” scout, not a planner and never prepared, just reacts to whoever happens to be on the stage instead of rooting out potential stars. Most people evaluating talent know better or else quickly find themselves out of casting work. The next kind of scout, the “pickers,” mistakenly single out a lone weakness in a player and eliminate him despite other notable strengths. “Performance-based” scouts, who account for an overwhelming majority, make their evaluations solely on the basis of the audition performance. This scouting approach has a significant flaw, which is that it places undue emphasis on the circumstances in which the player auditions, such as, perhaps, a high school star hitting or pitching against inferior talent. Finally, there is the “projector,” the category in which Lucadello counted himself and all other casting directors who understand that the audition performance doesn't matter. Does the actor have the skills required to act, and act exceptionally, once cast into the role? An audition takes place to answer that question alone and to project such talent into the future of live performances.
How, then, do you select the right person to fill a role? Ironically, it's not by looking for the “ideal” person at all, at least not in terms of corresponding to some preconceived characterization. Rather, you do it by taking notice of who exhibits raw talent and acuity in making compelling choices. Do that, and you'll find someone ideal for the role—just as Michael Shurtleff found Barbra Streisand, and Tony Lucadello found Mike Schmidt.
With interviews downplayed, the onus in casting switches to asking the right questions not of the candidate but of yourself—questions such as the following:
How does the actor communicate? Pay particular attention to how he listens.
How does the actor involve and play off others? Note how he relates to fellow actors in the audition and in what circumstances he looks to seek, give, and avoid assistance.
What does he want out of every interaction? Check for signals about what motivates the actor.
How does the actor handle unfamiliar situations, disruptions, and interruptions? Look for demonstrations of self that emerge only when things move out of his control.
Does his sense of rhythm and tempo make connections with the audience? Use the events in the audition to look for various sequences, progressions, and durations of activity that seem to go most smoothly.
Does she have a sense of humor? What the actor finds funny and how he improvises his own quips indicate volumes about both his level of intelligence and willingness to learn.
Did the actor do something unusually creative? Look for unique combinations of choices made during the audition (and not only the choices themselves).
Were there any positive surprises? Consider how well the actor manages the audience's expectations.
Now design an audition that provides answers to questions such as these. Again, don't judge the particular choices made in the audition: auditioning remains, after all, an artificial environment. Instead, evaluate the actor's ability to make choices that create full [characterizations = representations] for his [roles = responsibilities].
You should not make final casting decisions immediately after auditioning all the prospective players. Instead, schedule callbacks for those under serious consideration, where now an interview provides valuable information. (HR departments today typically do this in reverse, interviewing all candidates while having only the one hired perform.) Probe for insights into each person's offstage interests. Remember, individuals with the greatest reservoir of life experiences will make the most interesting choices once cast. And finally, when making these casting decisions, consider that, as one director advises, you are “casting relationships rather than individual roles.”28 Any new actor, however well qualified for the role, is really suitable only to the extent that his addition enhances the dynamic interplay between all cast members of the [ensemble = organization].
Again, the casting director shouldn't impose his own interpretation of the part as one of the criteria for hiring. That is not his role. Rather, the casting director must assist producers and directors in finding those who also know how to fill their respective roles.
Recognizing the Dramatis Personae
Many people have seen the list of characters in an issue of Playbill or the scrolling credits at the end of a movie but may not know its name: dramatis personae, described by NTC's Dictionary of Theatre and Drama Terms as “from the Latin, meaning the characters in a play; also, the list of them. Shown at the beginning of a play script or in the printed program for a performance, the list may merely give the names of the characters and the actors who play them or may include brief descriptions of the characters. The term is also used in a joking way for the participants in any event.”29 The term deserves more serious consideration, and the practice more widespread use, in the Experience Economy.
On rare occasions, businesses acknowledge employees publicly in writing. Annual reports list senior officers. On-duty placards display the names of managers at some service establishments; ditto drivers of rental car shuttle buses. Slips of paper inform us our garment was inspected by #7, whoever that might be. Yet customers rarely se
e full acknowledgment of all the players involved in the production of a good or service. Why not? It's because only staged experiences merit display of a dramatis personae—and all experience stagers should display one. Of course, guests may not care to read the names of every costume designer or supporting actor who helped stage the experience (just as few stay until the end of movies to read every last credit). No matter, because the dramatis personae exists not for the customers but for the players, and not only for the stars but also for those who never set foot onstage during a performance, the business equivalents of gaffers, key grips, and Foley artists: the dramaturgs, scriptwriters, technicians, and stage crew (not to mention the casting director). The list recognizes their performances along with the onstage actors, producers, and directors who so often receive not only the credit but the fame as well. The dramatis personae sets the stage for the next production run by commemorating the preceding one.
Just as business theatre can learn from the performing arts by means of such long-standing practices, so too can the arts learn from business. In Standing Room Only: Strategies for Marketing the Performing Arts, Philip Kotler, marketing professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and his colleague Joanne Scheff encourage those managing the arts to embrace business principles in order to keep the arts alive.30 They recommend mixing both an “art-centered approach” that sees the arts in terms of unbridled expression and a “market-centered approach” that sees it as a hard-nosed business. What concert pianist and educator David Owen Norris shared with Kotler and Scheff regarding musical performances—“We must make the experience relevant for the audience and either satisfy or surprise audience expectations”—applies to every performance, no matter where or how performed, on the theatre stage or at the workplace.31
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