Biobank
A resource for Town & Gown directors
Your program should have room for short biographies of cast members and possibly crew as well. You bear responsibility for the entire program, so this is your affair too.
Directors in recent times have handled bios in three ways:
- Written the entries themselves
- Had the talent prepare them to some standard, or edited them to a standard
- Let the program show pretty much whatever the actors wrote for themselves
Points to consider in making your decision:
- How much space do you have? A cast of 20 must write more concisely than a cast of 6.
- How dignified a program do you want? You can get consistency in tone and style if you take a hard line on bios.
- How sensitive are you to audience members' carking? Some of them (who, in my view, could well get a life) will complain to you if your actors put jokes in.
A few personal suggestions:
- Insist that your cast members include at least one reference to a previous T&G appearance. The bio, read at intermission, should answer the question, "Where the hell have we seen this one before?"
- Require that every entry start with actor's name and role(s) in parentheses unless there is a good reason for doing otherwise.
- Do plan to edit the bio entries to give them some consistency. In particular:
- Check the spelling of character names and show titles. Actors ought to be hyper-conscious of proper billing, but they are most often scandalously careless.
- Write play titles in italics.
- Don't enclose character names in quotation marks.
- If one abbreviates "T&G," they all should.
- Once you've edited the entries, show them to your talent and allow time for appeals and revisions.
- Remove theater credits that aren't true.
- If actors want to "dedicate" their performances, make sure they all spell "Savior" the same way.
I've collected some pages of biographies from Town & Gown shows; click to view them (I make no guarantee that they will all be the same size, though).
- Cyrano de Bergerac (large cast)
- The Play's the Thing (medium cast)
- Desdemona (small cast)
- The Misanthrope (medium cast)
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Biobank