Thank you for submitting for SAY MY NAME, a new play based on a true story being featured in the BROADWAY BOUND THEATRE FESTIVAL! We are thrilled that you are interested in being a part of this developmental process.

To submit, please tape the following:

-SLATE: Name, Height, Union Status & Location. Please also let us know if you are available for the planned in-person NYC callback on 6/11.

-SIDES: The full material below for your requested role(s) below which you can access by clicking on the link.

MARCUS DESHAWN THOMPSON (Click here to access material)

MAYOR JAMES “JIM” JENKINS (Click here to access material)

SARAH (Click here to access material)

REVEREND HARRY CLAYTON (Click here to access material)
*For this role, please also include a brief song cut sung acapella - something you like to sing.

RHONDA THOMPSON (Click here to access material)
*For this role, please also include a brief song cut sung acapella - something you like to sing.

OFFICER DAVID REYNOLDS (Click here to access material)

THE ANCESTORS/AIDE (Click here to access material)
*For this role, please also include a brief song sung acapella - something you like to sing.

Note on Singing Request: We are not looking for technically advanced singers, but actors who are comfortable singing on stage as a part of the play.

Tapes are due in by 5/26/26 by 2pm. I cannot extend the deadline, so do your best to submit them before the deadline! If you have any questions, please email me at hdbauditions@gmail.com

IMPORTANT: You must be local to the NYC area to be considered for this production. The producer does not provide housing. AEA or NON UNION performers may apply as this is a Showcase Code Contract. Please do NOT submit if you are not available for the rehearsal or performance dates listed in the breakdown below.

We look forward to your submissions!

SAY MY NAME – BROADWAY BOUND THEATRE FESTIVAL - NYC
Producer: Jeff Perlman
Director: Reena Dutt
Written by: Jeff Perlman
Casting: Holly Buczek, HDB Casting

Venue: AMT Theatre, NYC
AEA Showcase Code
$500 stipend (10% commission will not be added)

DATES:
Rehearsals: 6/29/26-7/18/26
Tech*: 7/22
First Performance*: 7/23 – 2:00pm
Performances*: 7/23 - 2:00pm; 7/25 - 8:00pm; 7/26 - 5pm
*Please do not submit if you are not available these dates. 
Self-tape due: 5/27/26
Callbacks: 6/11/26

SYNOPSIS: When a fifteen-year-old Black boy is killed by a white officer, the city's mayor sees the boy's ghost in his office and refuses to read the prepared statement. He walks to the podium and tells the truth at a press conference. The ninety-second speech ends his career. Twenty years later, the boy is still with him, his former chief strategist returns to confront a quote that named what she has spent thirty years not asking, and a fifteen-year-old who has been waiting two decades for someone to say his name out loud finally goes home. Say My Name is a haunting in two movements about witness, complicity, and what it costs to become the person a single night made you. 

MARCUS DESHAWN THOMPSON (M, 18+ to play 15 yrs, Black/African American) He was on his way home from a school dance when he was shot and killed by a police officer. Marcus is not a victim and not a symbol. His soul roams the earth, only visible to Mayor Jenkins. He seeks resolution with Major Jenkins and craves moving on to the next phase of the afterlife.  He is the moral center of the play — but he is not its conscience-bearer. He is its presence.

MAYOR JAMES 'JIM' JENKINS (M, 50s, White American) A career politician at a crossroads. He is haunted by being the only person who can see Marcus. He yearns to come to terms with his responsibilities as a politician but ultimately, as an empathetic human being., Jenkins is exhausted, decent, and barely holding the line between who he wanted to be and who the work has made him. The role asks for restraint, intelligence, and an actor capable of sustaining stillness under pressure. 

SARAH (F, 30s-40s, Any ethnicity, American) Jenkins's chief strategist. Sarah is brilliant, exacting, loyal, and operating an internal cost ledger she has not let herself fully examine in thirty years. She watches Jenkins torch everything she has built for him. She returns twenty years later because a magazine profile prints a quote of his that finally names what she has spent thirty years not asking: should they follow her advice? 

REVEREND HARRY CLAYTON (M, 58, Black/African American). Pastor of First Baptist Church. He baptized Marcus when he was eight years old. Clayton is the play's deepest theological wound and its most quietly devastated witness. By the end of the play, he has buried forty-three more children since Marcus, and his faith has not survived intact. He still preaches. He still reads the names every fourth Sunday. He no longer knows what he believes.

RHONDA THOMPSON (F, 30s-50s, Black/African American) Marcus's mother. A single parent who has raised her son alone since his father died in a car accident when Marcus was three. She is not a saint and not a symbol. She is chasing the impossible — keeping her son in the room with her, through sheer force of refusing to accept that he is gone. 

OFFICER DAVID REYNOLDS (M, 20s-30s, White) The officer who fired the shots. He is a young man who was trained for forty hours on threat assessment and pulled the trigger in two-point-three seconds because that is what his training prepared him to do. He is a man trying to find a way to keep living with what he did — and discovering, twenty years apart, that the way he chose was simply to stop letting himself feel it. Reynolds is the play's most uncomfortable presence and its most ordinary. 

THE ANCESTORS/AIDE (M/F/Non-Binary, All ages, Black/African American) Shadowy figures of all ages. All victims of violence. They hum spirituals in the darkness.