Audition #4: Strawhats

A while back I attended the Strawhat Auditions in New York City.  The whole ordeal ended up being quite a blur of success and failure.  What I found there was a pretty extreme realization of who and what I am when it comes to not only how I see myself as a theatre artist but as well as how the rest of the theatrical world sees me. Attending all of these auditions is allowing me to discover where I fit best in this world of theatre, and after attending the Strawhat Auditions and I realized that whatever world I was experiencing there was not something I was a part of.

The Audition:

The Stage at Pace University where Inside The Actor's
Studio is filmed.  Pretty neat set-up.

When I got to Pace University, where the Strawhat auditions were being held at, I was quickly shepherded into the area where all the actors were being held.  As I was sitting there I made sure to carefully observe all the actors. I wanted to establish myself and the atmosphere of the audition.  Looking around I saw that none of the actors were readers of my blog, because they were all dressed to the nines.  I saw suits, cocktail dresses, maybe even a prom dress or two.  It was a little bit outrageous.  Also everyone was extremely young, and when I say young, I mean young.  Everyone looked like they had just gotten their high school diploma, and not only did they look like it, they acted like it.  All were crazy nervous and were not helping themselves by doing excessive warm ups, ridiculous monologue mouthing, and stank looking all their “competition”.  At this point I chose to just go inward, ignore all the craziness going on around me and attempt to prepare my mind and body to audition.  All this preparation finally ended when the stage manager came in.  She put all of us in a line and walked us to the audition area. She explained that we would be moving in one by one to the theatre and eventually to the stage to audition.  She reminded all of us to remember our slate and not to be nervous. She must have gotten the same vibes from the room as I did, because she reminded us about five or six times.  As I get to take my spot offstage I get to see the two girls in front of me perform their song and monologue. I always enjoy getting to watch others audition because it helps me see what is and isn’t working with others, as opposed to only being able to be criticize myself. I watch them in a state of terror, because they are awful.  Just awful. They are awful in the sense that not only can they not find their pitch throughout their whole entire song, but they manage to make Christopher Durang and Neil Labute dramatic as a Shakespearian tragedy.  Granted, as I’m sure you’re aware, I can be a harsh critic, but both of these girls showed themselves to be extremely unprepared in every sense of the word (you would be saying the same thing if you saw them).  So, if anything, I was excited to go after them because, hopefully I would be able to bring up the room and show them what I could do.  Well, I get up there and I do my slate and in the moment I make the choice not to say anything about my availability. I wanted to test the system out and allow myself to be open for all callbacks, just to see what happens.  A little devilish, but I just wanted to see if it really was me or my availability that was or was not getting me callbacks.  For this audition I did the Biron and Buff combination and I felt really grounded in both pieces. I felt that both had their differences and their similarities that allowed for an easy transition from one to the other, but at the same time showed a good range of acting ability.  After I finish my pieces and do my final slate I walk off stage and am greeted by a plethora of “good jobs”, “that was great”, “what were those pieces?” and “where do you go to school?”, that made me feel really confident and successful in my audition.  After I had finished I reside to sitting in the hallway and wait till the end of the hour for all the callbacks to be posted.  I am hoping that with how successful I felt after the audition that I would at least have the opportunity to build up some contacts, if not work options, with a few callbacks.  Well the hour finally comes to a close and I go to check the callback board.  I’m going through all the theaters, I finally get to the end and realize I have once again got zero callbacks.  Zero. Again. 

I’m going to make a confession here and say that I was truly upset and frustrated when I figured this out.  I’m usually pretty good about allowing it all to roll off my back and move on to the next one, but I felt like this was a legit hit at my acting ability, considering I saw two horrible people in front of me and for the first time had felt really good about the actual audition. As I’m leaving the theatre feeling completely dejected I stop at Starbucks and have a serious conversation with myself about everything I was doing.  In this conversation I made several legit self discoveries.  I realized that I had been going about everything in wrong way.  I walked into this audition desperately hoping that some theatre, any theatre, would give me just one callback, but in reality I wouldn’t callback any of these theaters for myself.  So the big question that I proposed to myself was: did these companies I was auditioning for really deserve the ability to decide for me if I was a decent actor or not.  Upon asking myself this question I came back with a big resounding NO.  The work that these companies were doing was nothing that I really wanted to be a part of, I was just desperate for a job and hoping that one of these theaters would be that golden opportunity, but in reality I had no place auditioning for them when they weren’t doing work that they wanted me a part of or I wanted to be a part of.  So in resolution I came to the realization that when I am a out searching for auditions and theaters to work for, I really need to make sure to do the extensive research and consistently ask myself the question - “Would I value this theatre’s opinion of my acting ability if I auditioned for them.” Now this may sound like a really pretentious question to ask, but I think it all goes back to knowing who you are as an actor.  An actor who has just worked on Broadway would never go all the way back to square one and start auditioning for internships and apprenticeships. It’s just they way it is. I just have to make an authentic observation of where I feel like I am at in my quality of work and find theaters that do work of that similar quality.  An easy thing to say but a harder thing to do.  So hopefully with this new lease on my acting career I will be able to find much success when I attend SETC.  I have my fingers and my toes crossed at least. 

Next Up:
SETC - The granddaddy of all unified auditions.  This blog is going to be a two-parter.  Look for it sooner rather than later.