As the man in the plaster cast discovered, the results can sometimes be surprising.
It was surreptitiously and illegally cast, discovered in a car wreck that killed its owner, declared a fake, forgotten in a closet for decades and then declared authentic.
The cast discovered at the first reading not only that they had a different version of the play from the one the director had, but also that the play had been revised four times since 1960.
When the racist sheriff, one of two "grown-ups" in the cast, discovers two black "babes" among 12 white ones, he threatens to close the show before it opens.
The evidence comes in the form of preserved burrow casts discovered in the Transantarctic Mountains, although no bones were found.
Nonetheless, the cast members discover real characters amid the abstractions, even if they haven't quite found their natural rhythms in the second act.
In Arien (1979), the evening-dressed cast is discovered lying in ankle-deep water.
When she got out of the hospital, wearing a hip cast, she discovered that a rural school was no place for a student who was unable to walk.
Some cast mates discovered this year that they could earn tens of thousands of dollars through club appearances and other outside activities, and there were reports that they were holding up production while demanding big raises from MTV.
