BWW Blog: Out of the Box's Audition Workshop Brings Out My Inner Performer

Audition horror stories. Wrenching, soul-crushing moments of inferiority and humiliation. Every performer has at least one. The grind of auditioning is a crapshoot of yes, no, maybe, probably not, thanks but no thanks. There can be joy in the act of auditioning if you love what you do, but failure and rejection remain lurking, ever-present potentials. As an undergrad, I had to audition for a spot in Acting 1, a required class for my degree. I tried to be flippant about the experience, a defensive choice; I walked onstage and gave my name-and then began to explain that I wasn't going to talk about whoever had originally performed the monologue because I didn't want to be compared to them because they were getting paid to be an entertainer and I wasn't. I just wanted to paint sets and play with power tools and maybe put out a fire on stage should the opportunity arise. I memorized this speech to a closer level of detail than I did my monologue. I made it through eight words before the professor running the audition held up his hand: STOP!

Don't do this, he said, which was supremely embarrassing. I'd worked with him before and was hoping our previous association might help me skate into the class. Now I actually had to make the cut, and I had no discernable aptitude for the craft of acting. Stop talking. Walk off this stage. Come back on and start again, and don't say any of whatever you were just going to say. Just say your name and the play your monologue is from, and then start at the beginning. That's all we want to hear.

I took a minute to recover, and with a fatalistic sense of the insurmountable stakes that hadn't existed a moment earlier, I did the monologue-hands sweating, eyes nervous, double-speed. I got wait-listed for the class. The prof took pity on me and let me in anyway.

Ten years later, I'm still not an actress. I appreciate theatre for it's unique storytelling capacity, how the aesthetic of the stage design and the performance fall together to represent aspects of the human experience. My interest in acting is in its function as a cog in the storytelling machine. Performance is the conduit for the emotional expression that creates connection with the audience, yet it's the aspect of theatre with which I have very little personal experience.

I will never audition for a show, but in an attempt to explore this last unfamiliar frontier of the theatrical arts, I signed up for an audition workshop. I thought a personal understanding of the performance process would benefit my artistic development within the context of the shows I review and the shows I produce with Out of the Box Theatre Company. Out of the Box's Artistic Director, Samantha Eve, offers a number of unique workshops as enrichment opportunities for the theatre community in Santa Barbara, the most recent of which was a pop/rock audition workshop designed to give performers a chance to expand their audition books to include contemporary music, and then perform their new songs at a showcase a week later. The success of shows like American Idiot, Rock of Ages, and Jersey Boys has made the ability to perform these musical styles a necessity; Out of the Box, for instance, produces only contemporary musicals.

Like many artists, my personality is susceptible to capricious waffling between overconfidence that borders on narcissism and crippling self-doubt. It was in a moment of overconfidence that I signed up for the workshop, and it was in several moments of self-doubt that I almost backed out. I contrived scripted excuses as to why I couldn't attend, and decided whether or not the emotional agony of being a non-performer in a room full of triple-threats was worth a bit of experience-based knowledge. I remember days in Acting 1 when I'd make it to the door of the classroom and lose my nerve at the last second. Once, my hand was turning the door handle when I stopped and listened and determined that whatever the class was doing (which sounded like they were pretending to be dinosaurs) was not an activity I was willing or able to do.

In the end, I pulled it together and reminded myself that college was a long time ago. Also, I'd run dry of viable excuses not to participate. I attend the workshop, and realize the awful truth: I am, by several years, the oldest person in the room. Half the performers are under 18. One girl is 12. She is assigned Wunderkind as her performance song and she has never heard of Alanis Morissette.

"Jagged Little Pill" taught me how and why to be pissed off at men, I tell her, and she doesn't seem to register the usefulness of knowing how to be effectively angry at your lover. Everyone here seems to have an acting coach or a singing coach or some other sort of coach, and all I have is a therapist who questions why I'm still depending on a 1995 Alanis Morissette album to relate to my adult angst. I sip surreptitious from my whiskey lemonade as the 12-25 set performs their audition pieces. I'm intimidated by high school students. In desperation, I wonder if my need for boozy confidence makes me a coward, and if the realization of my cowardice makes me angry, and if that anger is something I can "use" for performance.

Anger is not an emotion, Samantha, who is running the workshop, warns. Yelling your lyrics at us doesn't make the story behind your song viable.

Shit. At least I'll have a new source of determinable self-loathing to discuss with my therapist. I wait until the last possible minute to perform my audition song. I wait until there are no more volunteers and only I am left. The six-foot traverse from my chair to the front of the room is dead man walking.

I am not a vocalist. I can carry a tune, usually, but my voice is in no way impressive or pleasant to listen to. It's low and gravelly and manages to convey sarcasm even in sincerity. I sing. My voice shakes.

Sam offers advice: Be conscious of your hands. Root your feet. Don't be afraid to show your personality. Be authentic. The side dish is an acting crash-course designed to teach me how to tell the emotional story of the song lyrics while I'm singing them, which seems advanced considering I'm having trouble remembering all the words. Don't close your eyes, she says. That's cheating. That's you having a private moment with yourself. You need to relate to the audience.

I find it unfathomable that people would do this on purpose week in and week out, audition after audition after show after show after role after role after role. Acting at its best and worst reveals something about the performer to those willing to see it, to those available to understand the depth of the honesty and the mess being funneled into a character. Acting isn't about being fake; it's about being real, and I don't have that level of discipline.

A week later we do a sound check at the venue an hour before the performance. It's my first time using a microphone. I don't know how to adjust its height. I've never had to use one before because I've never had to sing in front of an audience, and my speaking voice is loud enough to fill the room if I need it to. Never once has anyone yelled LOUDER! from the nosebleeds. I sing into the mic. I'm not close enough. No one can hear me.

For those of you old enough to drink, Sam says before we break for dinner, please don't have too many before you go onstage because you think it'll help. Believe me, it won't. She points two fingers at me. I put my hands up like the police are coming through the door. Scout's honor. I will be there, and I will be sober. Ish. And then she says something that I desperately need to hear: Trust yourself. Even though I don't, it's nice to know that someone thinks I should have the capacity to.

Show time. Family and friends are there to witness the spectacle. I even posted the event on Facebook, albeit cryptically and a mere five minutes before the show, to satisfy my Millennial's compulsion to commemorate occasions by searing them indelibly to the face of social media. I have three cocktails before leaving the house. I sit in the green room with performers who are all younger and more experienced than I am and decide whether or not I'm going to vomit.

I'm hidden in the middle of the line-up, and I'm planning on using the crutch of conversation to present myself as a personality instead of a vocalist to ease my apprehension. I walk on stage, into the tiny space allotted for me next to the piano, and I talk. I talk about the success of the workshop and what a great resource it provides the theatrical community, and won't you all give us some money? I talk about how we love our young performers, and thank all the parents in the audience for supporting their kids' artistic endeavors and not forcing them to become accountants. Then, with no more monologue and no one else in the audience to shake for a drink or a donation, I look to the accompanist and plunge to the depths.

The first note is a shit-show, but I'm past the point of caring. I locate enjoyment in the horrible, hilarious sensation of being average and forgettable, and have fun regardless. I find the music and manage to hang onto it, though I predictably forget everything Sam taught me about telling a story through the performance. I'm too far from the mic, I don't plant my feet, I gesticulate to the heavens and beyond; I scoop notes and hit thirds and fifths and god-knows-what that aren't in the music, and at one point I even close my eyes. Any inclination I have for acting dissolves. A song without an acting performance isn't musical theatre, and I successfully did not perform musical theatre. Twice.

You're really entertaining on stage! my dad says after it's all over and done and I don't have to feel like throwing up anymore. You should do this all the time! This may really change the direction of your life!

Bless his enthusiasm. No, I assure him, the experience didn't awaken anything in me. I never have to wonder if I'm missing something essential by not being an actress, and I got an important feel for the other side of the curtain-what happens on stage when I'm fluffing wigs in the dressing room and spraying people with blood, and eating leftover Panda Express because I don't have to present a part of myself that's vulnerable to a crowd of anonymous faces. My ability to parade myself laid bare over and over again is not sustainable, and while I appreciated the experience, my schedule of upcoming performances will remain sparse. Some people have the obsession to seek spotlight, the urgency to perform renditions of circumstances representative of the human experience. I do not feel that call, though I've stepped closer to understanding its appeal; regardless, I'm satisfied backstage.

For More Information about upcoming Performances and Workshops, visit: http://www.outoftheboxtheatre.org

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