Erica in American Theater’s ROLE CALL – Theater worker you should know

Erica Jensen

Profession: Casting director
Hometown: Tampa, Fla.
Current home: Park Slope, Brooklyn
Known for: At Calleri Casting, she’s worked on film and TV (“Most people get very excited when they hear I worked on Season 2 of ‘Chappelle’s Show’”), as well as theatre, including the Broadway shows Of Mice and Men and Fool for Love.
What’s next: At press time Calleri’s office was busy peopling the Humana Festival at Kentucky’s Actors Theatre of Louisville in March and two Broadway shows for the fall.
What makes her special: Her colleague James Calleri praises Jensen as “the voice of calm in a crazy industry.” More importantly, he notes, she has “great taste and loves actors, which I believe is the key to success.” Director Joanna Settle calls Jensen “my first-call casting director since 2009. She tunes with such precision to the needs of a creative team, always ready to change approach as the process reveals new avenues to pursue. The casting process itself is often what clarifies the director’s ideal casting, and she is a dream partner to have on that adventure.”
Expecting the unexpected: She was pursuing acting when she started as a casting intern at Playwrights Horizons two decades ago and never looked back. She now works with Calleri and another colleague, Paul Davis, and says she enjoys the variety of media they work in, which makes her job “always interesting and unpredictable.” Her theatregoing tastes tend toward the overtly theatrical—as she puts it, “plays that are unquestionably plays and could not fit into any other medium,” citing examples such as Soho Rep’s An Octoroon and Underground Railroad Game at Ars Nova. “Unexpected things occurring onstage that make you question what is real and what’s not are thrilling to me.”