Production meeting - casting

A production meeting was set up to discuss castings for both characters and casts. Firstly, we started by deciding what the stock characters were in the play. This decision was fairly easy:
Old woman
Young woman
Old man
Young man
Antagonists
The first problem we faced, was how many antagonists we wanted. There were mixed reviews on 2 or 3. Pros and cons for both were being able to have the good cop/bad cop relationship, more people to manipulate, and sort out the odd number we had having 11 performers with Laura being technician.
The conclusion, after much deliberation, where everyone got their opinion on the table by passing a book around the circle where you could only talk holding it, which was a very effective technique ! , we decided on two antagonists per cast and Lee would stay the old man in both. This was due to most preferences on 2 antagonists and Karl really wanting to play that part, meaning we had a gap in one of the casts. Lee was happy to do both, so we moved on.
We then gave our 1st and 2nd preferences to who we would like to play, from that it became quite obvious and simple to allocate roles to everyone.
The most challenging was deciding on who went in what cast. The main women were split into similar looks, Liv and I both blonde Mandi and Chloe both brown/dark haired. It was the young couples that were the issue to split. We had worked in pairs originally, but didn't get the opportunity to work with the other and test what the outcome was. Therefore, for the remainder of the rehearsal, we went off and learnt the two duets performing them with the opposite partner.
This carried on into the following day, where we still hadn't made a decision. I am first to admit that I didn't voice my opinion strong enough for fear of other people's feelings, as there are some big personalities in the group that I didn't want to upset. The deciding on the casting is still on going, but hopefully resolved asap. Not voicing our opinions early on has made it more difficult and added un needed tension, however, we feel strongly about the right pairings due to having to work in them for the remainder of the project, and the overall feel of each cast should be to the best as it can be. Even though it's been slightly stressful, and probably made the process drag a little, it is teaching me to be bold in my opinions, because skirting round issues makes it far more difficult. So it's been a lesson well taught.