"It sort of ups the ante in terms of audience involvement, I think," says the show's director, Peter Canavese. "It's billed as a different show every night, which is sort of true. The script never changes, but the audience does dictate—as much as an actor affects a role—it really does dictate the form and content of the play in the way that it's differently cast each night."

The myriad casting possibilities—there are more than 40,000 possible combinations—may seem like a nightmare story problem left over from statistics class, but the play's plot is simple enough. Eat the Runt follows Merritt, a candidate for a job at an art gallery, as he or she goes through a series of individual interviews with various gallery staff, with Merritt tailoring each encounter to what he/she thinks that particular interviewer wants to hear.

Crozier wrote the play to be cast by the audience, and that is partly facilitated by the script's deliberate ambiguities in regards to the characters. Canavese says, "You could do it just casting it regularly and just putting it on, but I think it gains so much from the audience doing the casting—it's written very much to that idea. All of the lines are very sly in terms of references to gender and race."

Besides, at least for a night, audiences will get to enjoy the powerful job of casting director. Canavese describes the casting process: "At the beginning of the evening, the actors all introduce themselves with a little spiel. And then we also introduce the nature of the characters by way of a PowerPoint presentation for the audience, which we thought would be kind of funny in the corporate milieu. And then it's going to be an applause-generated casting process. We'll sort of work our way down the line of the actors with each part in mind. You know, who the audience most wants to see in that part."

To further enhance the audience's sense of involvement, the company will be staging the show in the round, which Canavese says is a first for Eat the Runt. "That's a very intimate setting for any play and particularly for this one," says Canavese. "It really puts you right in there. Not only is the audience close to the actors that they've cast in these roles, but they're also kind of looking across the stage and seeing each other."

Staging the show in the round added one more challenge to the long list of formidable tasks inherent in such an unusual play. Since the actors can potentially end up playing every role in the show, each cast member needed to learn the lines and the blocking for every role, 80 solid pages of script, in all. Because the show is so labor-intensive, the casting of Eat the Runt was a challenge. Says Canavese, "I knew I needed to find actors who were really flexible and had really strong instincts, who I could trust to think fast, who thought fast at the audition and who could play not just one kind of part, but any kind of part. That was really essential, so I think we have kind of the cream of the crop here, who have survived." The director also initially cast more actors than were needed to have some backup in case some cast members had too much trouble tackling so many roles.

Each character was developed collectively by the cast and will have a signature prop—such as eyeglasses or a Palm Pilot—which actors will use to help get into that character. Also the cast is constantly being rotated in rehearsals. "Every rehearsal, they're playing a character they didn't play the day before, so that we try to maximize in that way their preparations to do anything on a nightly basis."

Although it's true to a certain extent for all theater that you'll never the same show twice—even with the exact same cast, performances will have the tiniest differences from night to night—with Eat the Runt, a different show every night is pretty much a guarantee, thanks to the audience. It underscores what an interactive medium theater really is. "It's a tremendous challenge for the cast and a big thrill for the audience to cast the show," says Canavese. "I think with this play, it'll be a bit like climbing into a habitat at the zoo."

The Renegade Theatre Experiment performs "Eat the Runt" July 25­Aug. 9 (with pay-what-you-can previews July 23­24) at the Benson Theatre at Bellarmine, Elm Street and Emory Avenue, San Jose. Tickets are $10­$18. For more information, visit www.renegadetheatre.com.