“Riot Productions brings back its 2024 award-winning piece “Audition Sides“, now to the main stage at MOXIE Theatre.
Written by Sarah Alida LeClair, who also performs as (The Woman), ‘Sides was inspired by the unsettled love story of pianist/singer Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, composer, pianist, and conductor. The setting of the play is an audition, where The Woman is on her fourth callback and has prepared everything, including songs and monologues. Because of her experience, the actress knows the creatives are struggling to find a male counterpart for her. When she sees The Man (Timothy Benson) sitting in the lobby, old (present) wounds re-surface.
Sarah’s playwriting is smart and witty, pinpointing various vices in the industry. Like, dismissed audition materials; contracts already given, but still doing auditions for those parts anyway (a practice that also happens in other professions, with posting job positions and doing interviews while having the person already…just saying). And dear reader, I think that is the most dishonest and slimy practice of them all! Anywhoosies, as inside baseball as this play is for the theatre and the industry, it can be universally relatable.
LeClair and Benson have strong stage chemistry, and that definitely came through in the room.
Sarah’s portrayal as The Woman is multilayered and intense, bringing strength and fragility, honesty, passion, and heartbreak with prime expression. I am happy to see Benson doing more onstage work, as he has a cool flair, great diction, and poise. Josalyn Johnson as The Proctor provides comedic relief, moving smoothly across the stage and beyond, delivering hilarious lines that are also very recognizable as real characters in the industry. Rhiannon McAfee’s direction has a straightforward frame with a trace that moves back and forth among the three characters, with Johnson, as well as being the comedic relief, being the visual one when moving offstage and giving way to Hayden St. Clair’s spot on sound every time the door opened to reveal snippets of the said dance call in the piece bringing plenty of laughs and play.
There is also a cool plot twist (at least I did not see it coming, and I enjoyed it lol) to the eventful audition. Another beauty of Audition Slides is that it is 70 minutes long, with no intermission. The run is short but mighty; you have two opportunities to catch it. Tonight and tomorrow.
Looking forward to what Riot Productions brings for the rest of the theatre year.”
“Audition Sides” understands a specific kind of theatrical purgatory: the audition room, where you are expected to be calm, charming, and emotionally available for an undetermined amount of time that is decided by other people, all while your anxiety climbs.
Each time the audition scene is read, it becomes a kind of duel. Emotional points are scored, old wounds are reopened, and professional courtesy slowly erodes. This isn’t a nostalgic or sentimental breakup story; it’s an adult relationship full of contradictions, where these two people may understand each other more deeply than anyone else and still know they can’t stay together without destroying themselves. LeClair charts The Woman’s unraveling from controlled irritation at the unfairness of the process, to jealousy, vulnerability, and the brittle smile she keeps offering the relentlessly cheerful Proctor. Benson matches her beat for beat, creating a relationship that is intimate one moment, defensive the next, and always charged. Josalyn Johnson lands big laughs as the Proctor, with her bubbly obliviousness and a Starbucks coffee that should have an airtag on it, while subtly revealing the scars of someone who has also been shaped and damaged by this industry. It’s a reminder that even the people who “run the room” are performing their own survival strategies.”
“Sometimes the last place you expect to run into your ex is a waiting room—and sometimes that waiting room turns into a reckoning. We sat down with playwright, performer, and Riot Productions co-founder Sarah Alida LeClair to talk about “Audition Sides,” a razor-sharp short play about two actors trapped together in an uncomfortably romantic callback that refuses to end. What begins as an all-too-relatable professional hurdle quickly becomes something far messier: a collision of unresolved love, old wounds, and the careful masks we wear when we’re trying to be impressive, employable, and emotionally intact at the same time. By turns laugh-out-loud absurd and quietly devastating, “Audition Sides” captures the surreal pressure of high-stakes rooms—and the very human cost of pretending you’re fine when you’re anything but.” —Erin Marie Reiter, Broadway World “Talk Theatre To Me.”
July 10th, 2025 by Beth Accomando, KPBS.
“Riot Productions wanted to stage a musical created by women and featuring strong female characters…the company fell in love with “Gretel the Musical”, a reimagining of the famous Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Sarah LeClair, cofounder and artistic director, says “We’re looking for storytelling that shows women as more than just how they function in men’s lives and making men better, which is the subject of a lot of musicals. So we’re more interested in female-centric stories where there’s growth and agency of her own so that she doesn’t HAVE to exist only as a wife, mother, sister daughter.”
“Gretel the Musical” does all that…by putting Gretel at the center of her own story, and creating roles for her mother and the witch that challenge expectations.”
Beth Accomando’s recommendations for 2025 Fringe, including Riot’s “Death and Murder”:
“Rince Panic” — Michael Prine delivered spellbinding dance last year, so I’m confident he can do it again.
“Death and Murder and Poison and Scene” — Riot Productions looks to combine backstage melodrama with wicked humor.
“Pretty Beast” — I have been richly rewarded by female Japanese comedians in the past, so I’m game to gamble on this.
“Sonnets from Suburbia” — I will gamble on anything Shakespeare or Shakespeare adjacent.
“The Last Census” — Asian Story Theatre stirs up some political commentary.
“The Queen of Fishtown” — Feels like you are on the stoop of Katierose Donohue Enriquez’s hometown in Philly.
“Nighttime Julianne” — Lani Gobaleza was impressive on preview night.
“Makani Kai” and “Fre3sty13” — Both served up beautiful dance and music on preview night. Definitely worth checking out.
By Lauren Hance, author of “The Holy O” Play and host of the “What the Fringe?!” Podcast, this insider’s guide to San Diego’s International Fringe Festival (in the San Diego Reader) names Riot’s Production “Death and Murder and Poison and Scene” (by Sarah LeClair, starring Tim Benson, Delia Mejia, Brendan Macneil, Katee Drysdale and Cory Hammond) as its number one pick for 2025.
“Last year’s winner for Outstanding World premiere, local producer Sarah LeClair of Riot Productions, presents a new ensemble comedy. Leclair was once in a production of “A Perfect Crime” which has been running off Broadway for over 30 years and holding strong with a one-star review on Yelp. LeClair thought she could salvage this baffling crime drama, and started rewriting the script. Upon sharing the nw script with her friends they told her it was most definitely a comedy. Her pride was slightly damaged, but LeClair rewrote her rewrite and turned this disaster of a play into a hilarious farce. Think “Clue” meets “Noises off”.
San Diego Union Tribune: Best Things to do this week in San Diego (“Ashland”)
“Ashland”: Riot Productions will present a staged rading of this screenplay by Laura Preble about two resilient women who band together to form a found family to support one another and find resources for their two autistic sons. 6:30 p.m. Friday; 4:30 p.m. Saturday. City Heights Performance Annex, 3795 Fairmount Avenue, San Diego. Free but tickets are required.”–David Coddon, San Diego Union Tribune.
SD Voyager–The Role of Luck for Women
“What role has luck played in our business model? None. As women your odds of making it into a show are critically low and you have to work incredibly hard for every step you take. Nothing is given to you because of any work you’ve done in the past. No work is guaranteed because of your former successes. We have tow ork for every inch that we gain, whether that’s been in classes and lessons and master classes and audition coaching, or whether that’s been in networking and supporting each other’s shows, and just showing up to auditions. In the case of Riot, it’s meant drawing on existing networks of friends and acquantainces and having knowledge of people’s special skills in writing and directing and organizing and producing. It’s meant going to see dozens of shows to be able to recruit the right people for casting when we didn’t have that inside of an existing network. It’s meant talking to everyone; about everything, all the time in order to constantly be moving forward on producing the next project.
In short, it’s not luck, it’s not talent, it’s not magic.
It’s grit.
TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK HERE
Bold Journey–On Amplifying Women’s Voices
We ask the women we know in the theatrical community what they would do if they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted. Actors came back saying they had always wanted to direct. Musicians said they had scripts they’d written, directors had music they’d been working on. Successful women hadn’t been able to do the kinds of projects they’d been interested in branching out into because there wasn’t space in our community for them and no one would give them the opportunity.
We want to amplify not only the women-written projects that put women at the center, but we want to give opportunities for women to change and grow and excel in new areas where they perhaps haven’t yet had the chance to expand into.
We’re trying to create space, above all, for women. TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK HERE.
Canvas Rebel Magazine–On Real BIPOC Inclusivity
Financial gatekeeping excludes performers, writers, and storytellers from the intersection of communities of color and communities of poverty: even to participate at the lowest levels we are expected to have free access to transportation, pay for training, gain experience by paying for it or by being unpaid for a 20-40 hour a week part time job to performing in a show. Auditions are required for college programs and it’s difficult to compete without years and thousands of dollars of lessons, requiring money and transportation.
When performers, writers, and storytellers live at the intersection of communities of poverty and color and are excluded from training, education, and the stage itself, the writing, storytelling and performing in film and stage is overwhelmingly stories from white people to white people.In order to create real inclusivity we must invest in diversity financially–arts programs at all educational levels, engaging school outreach by theatres, and investing in diverse productions.
TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK HERE.