First Audition

Saturday evening I stood outside Studio B at Theater Puget Sound, the room where I’d taken my beginning acting class a year ago.  Two other people sat outside the room focusing on scripts.  At eight sharp the stage manager stepped out and invited me into the room.

I was introduced to the four auditors.  How did I feel at that moment?  A brief flash to many years ago, walking into a room of professors for my Ph.D. orals.  But different.  Graduate school is about writing and taking written exams.  Though you may have done mock orals (I hadn’t), you really aren’t trained for oral performance.  For an acting audition that’s exactly what you’ve prepared for.

So I was anxious, but nothing like that afternoon in Wheeler Hall.  I felt I was well rehearsed as far as remembering the lines of the two monologues I had prepared.  I had a bit of fear I would blank out, but some confidence that once I got the first line out the rest would flow without having to think it.  And that’s how it worked out.

How did I do?  Okay, I’d say.  The lines did flow.  How good was my acting expressiveness?  I’d say about 80% of the expressiveness I achieved when rehearsing the day before on my I-phone video.  For my first monologue, Duke Senior’s address to his group of followers in the woods, I scanned across the auditors, but didn’t focus on them.  I’d read an article on auditioning that said don’t speak to your auditor, which forces him to act back to you. 

But when I was done, they asked me to do the monologue again, this time addressing them as the Duke’s group.  So I did.

I didn’t get a part in the play (a Jacobean revenge tragedy).  So Roger, compare the rejection experiences of submitting a pitch to an agent for a novel and auditioning for a part in a play.
In the audition, you know you had someone’s full attention, not the equivalent of an eighteen-year-old intern’s eight-second scan of your pitch letter.  The audition response came the next day.  The auditor’s invitation to audition again for his next project may be the standard courtesy everyone gets, but it at least gives you the opportunity to think you were more or less one of the finalists for a part.  I spent a day experiencing disappointment, but also a sense that I’d broken the ice and would be able to do this again.  Hey, who gets a part on their first audition?

So practice, practice, practice.