How Does It All Work? Common Casting Unlike Anything Else, Say HRDC and Alums

An old adage says that acting is reacting. However, the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) also could argue that policy-making is reacting.

Born in spring of 1984, Common Casting was HRDC’s executive response to hectic, conflicting schedules within the University’s dramatic community.

The HRDC website explains Common Casting as a “week of auditions held at a central location at the beginning of every semester, where you can audition separately for nearly EVERY show that’s happening around the Harvard campus … for that semester. Anyone, whether affiliated with Harvard or not … is welcome to audition.”

Common Casting begins with a casual meet and greet—Pizza Q—at which directors advertise their shows and encourage actors to audition. Auditions take place for one week, as each show holds a number of three hour slots throughout the week in which to audition actors. Callbacks occur that weekend and cast lists are posted the following Monday. Actors have 24 hours to accept or reject roles.

Since its inception in 1908, Harvard has presented multiple plays, musicals and other theatrical works every semester. Before the current system, auditions for each show were conducted independently throughout the semester.

“Actors dropped out of one production to do another,” recalls Jonathan S. Miller ’72.

In 1984, the HRDC board, led by then-president Nick J. Wyse ’84, decided to coordinate auditions of the separate on campus theater companies.

Early on, bylaws—such as rules prohibiting directors from directly contacting actors before cast lists go up—had to be made to stop outside pressure from making actors’ decisions more politically complicated.

“The rules have gotten a little more careful,” says Miller, “[The goal of Common Casting is] to let the actor have the most possible freedom and not subject to undue pressure.”

Hundreds of people participate in Harvard’s Common Casting every semester, and those involved are not aware of this process existing anywhere else—in campus theater or professional theater.

“People would be quite hard pressed to imagine life without [Common Casting],” says Miller. “With the number of roles and actors involved, it’s difficult to imagine an alternative.”