Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Body Double


The other night, I went to a rare casting call in San Francisco Opera's ballet studio, a mostly bare room with a scruffy wood floor, two tables and some chairs along one long wall, a mirror covering the opposite wall. Just a handful of men showed up, but then, the call was pretty specific: for someone who looked similar to Mexican tenor Ramon Vargas (5'10", dark hair preferred; no singing, dancing, or speaking required) to appear in a couple of scenes toward the end of Jules Massenet's Werther, the season's second opera.

A few glam head shots of Vargas were taped to the mirror, and the ten or so contenders lined up next to them, like a police lineup on the wrong side of the one-way window. In their jeans and khakis, T-shirts and pullovers, they looked--OK, not like criminals, but as if they were on the stage crew, or maybe had stopped by to pick someone up. Not one had a vibe that said "actor."

Once director Francisco Negrin had culled the obvious non-Vargas types (the shortish African American man, the too-tall and the older, plus-size gray-haired men, the bald man), he asked the four remaining to walk toward him a couple of times. (Have you ever noticed how normal normal people look when they walk?) Then he asked two of them to lie on the floor on their backs and, when the other two approached and took their places, to get up and move away like a spirit departing the body. "Can you show me something more interesting now, give me some emotion?"

Eventually, he selected two men. But just after almost everyone had left the studio, Luis Javier Hernandez, who works in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, showed up: slim, dark-eyed; he even speaks Spanish. When he did his leaving-the-body moves, he rose and moved backward rather quickly, stumbled, and almost fell; but he regained his balance and continued out. A good recovery or good acting? "It was planned," he told Negrin. Either way, he'll be onstage with Vargas in September, too.

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