So much to catch up on... auditions

Over the last two days, I've had some pretty exciting auditions. On Monday, I went up to New York early in the morning to audition for the touring company with the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA. (Check out their website: www.americanshakespearecenter.com) Their touring company is doing Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The projects seem really exciting, and I was really excited to audition for this company again. A friend of mine and I auditioned for their tour two years ago without getting cast, but then he spent all of last season working with their resident company. So I was very excited to go up for this audition.

For my brief prepared monologue, I did a piece of Iago from "Othello," and I think I really nailed it. Lots of others in the audition were living in "Shakespeareland," where they don't really understand what they are saying. It feels stilted and measured, like they are delivering fantastic recitations but not really saying the words. The artistic director gave me a nice "Good," as I finished and sat down. Then I was asked to read for Guildenstern and the King in Hamlet, and I think I did really well. I sang a little bit from "Spitfire," and that was the audition. I think I did really well on the audition as a whole, and there was another guy in the group who was really a good actor. It was a very good day.

Then yesterday I went on an audition for the Eagles Youth Partnership, applying to be their Storybook Man. It's a job that is part of their educational outreach program, in which they go to schools and read stories to young school children. I had to read a book and a poem to the auditors, and it went very well. Not as well as I would have liked, but it was one of the best auditions in a while. They are going to be letting me know within the week if I'm moving on to the next round of auditions, where I'd have to actually go to a school and read to a classroom full of children. The gig is an okay one, but the pay is really amazing. So it's the kind of thing that I might do for the two months of the contract, making money, and then strike out into the acting world again. There are worse ways to make a living.