George clutched the rubber duck filled with baby powder behind his back as he entered the audition room. The hard plastic of the kazoo pressed into the clammy palm of his left hand. After glancing at the director across the room, he took a breath. “I will be doing the Hamlet ghost scene. I will be playing Hamlet and this,” he motioned to the rubber duck filled with powder, “is the ghost.”
George delivered Hamlet’s lines to the empty spot above the director’s head, and when it came time for the ghost to speak, he paused and squeezed the body of the duck, expelling a cloud of chalky white smoke. While the white plume hung in the air, George lifted the kazoo to his lips and played the ghost’s lines in a nasally buzz. Switching back into the Hamlet dialogue, he proceeded to take turns speaking the lines, squeezing the large rubber duck and playing the kazoo. By the end of the monologue, the air was thick with the scent of baby powder.
“Well,” said the director, “that was very, very unusual.”
“You wanted something in the new vaudevillian style,” replied George.
“Yes, I just wasn’t quite expecting that…thank you.” The casting call was for Waiting for Godot and George did not receive a call back.
George Contini, now the head of performance in the UGA Theatre and Film Studies Department, recounts this embarrassing audition story as a lesson to be learned. A successful audition can seem elusive. Reading books and taking classes about audition tips is helpful in learning concrete techniques, but learning from the mistakes of others can help you avoid them.
Stand-up for Yourself
Larry Cox Jr., a M.F.A. graduate student, knows the auditioning process can be intimidating. Before grad school, he received a call back for a show to read for a specific character. That night he poured over the script, learning everything about the character’s motivations, his relationships with other characters, his role in the play etc. By sunrise, Cox was an expert and felt confident in his ability to nail the callback. The next day, however, the director asked him to read for a completely different character. Cox had not researched this character and was ill prepared. “Instead of standing up for myself and saying I was actually told to prepare another character,” recounted Cox. “I let it go because I was inexperienced”.
The audition went badly.
“I should have been a fighter for myself,” says Cox. Speaking up in an audition is not wrong or inconsiderate. Everyone makes mistakes, including directors, so it’s best to standup for yourself and the audition material you’ve prepared.
You Have a Choice
At age 13, Charlie Cromer entered the world of professional theatre. Eager and filled with anticipation, he arrived at the La Comedia Dinner Theatre in Ohio, where he was auditioning for the musical Peter Pan. After learning that the role of Peter Pan was already cast, young Cromer’s excitement dimmed, but the hope of being cast as a Lost Boy kept him motivated. He and the other boys were divided into mixed-age groups and lead into the dark and dank theatre. The musty air mixed with the stench of the smoke wafting from the director’s cigarette who sat in the dim stage lighting. The director ran Cromer and the other boys through numerous dance numbers and forced them to tell jokes. Watching the 10-year-old boy next to him cry after the director told him that his jokes sucked was too much for Cromer. Although he was called back for additional dance calls, he looked up at his dad and said, “I don’t want to be a part of this.”
You may be auditioning for a fantastic theatre company and/or for the role of your dreams, but you must remember that the theatre company is also auditioning for you. “The actor has power,” says Cromer, who is now a performance graduate student and teaching assistant at UGA. Sometimes a successful audition is the one where you learn a little bit more about yourself and what you’re willing to settle for in the audition room.
Be Ready to Improvise
Preparation for an audition is stressed above everything else, but for Anthony Marotta, improvisation has saved more than a few of his auditions. In an audition for Frank Kafka’s Metamorphoses, Marotta was asked to perform his monologue as a bug. After the initial shock, Marotta got down on all fours and proceeded to deliver his monologue “as a bug.”
There is no telling what a director may ask of you in the audition room. Marotta, a performance professor at UGA, especially notices the bizarre requests “when dealing with directors who have no idea of what they want.” The best way to combat these requests in the audition room is through improv training. Once you can improvise, “say yes [to the director], have fun with it and play the game. You don’t get embarrassed anymore.”
The ultimate auditioning tip is to get out there and audition. Sometimes trial and error will prove to be the most useful when learning how to successfully audition.