More Stray Thoughts About Auditions

I like watching auditions is because helps me understand what acting is. William H. Macy said that he stopped teaching acting because someone could be taking lessons for ten years and still be mediocre; and then someone else could walk in the room who had never studied at all and be brilliant. Such is the mystery of acting.

Most of what is taught in acting schools and universities is just footnotes to Stanislavsky.

The best description of what Stanislavsky did was from Robert Brustein who said that Stanislavsky decoded the way great actors act.

There have always been trends in acting, not just from era to era, but also from country to country.

At the time that Stanislavsky started working out his system, the style of acting was frequently declamatory and in many cases non-specific. In 19th century acting classes (pre-Stanislavsky), you would learn how to die for example, in case you had to die on stage. There was a way to die and it was taught in schools. And everyone died the same way. There were some great actors in the 19th century and many of them taught. But they could not communicate how they created what they did onstage. There is an excellent description of this acting training in the book Stanislavsky in Rehearsal by Vasili Toporkov.

Stanislavsky’s system for finding the individual performer’s truth was a tonic for a kind of general, histrionic performance. The work on truth that Stanislavsky was doing became crystalized in this country when his teachers came to America in the mid-1920s. And when Stanislavsky went back to Russia, he continued his research on acting and moved forward, while we in America did not. At the end of his life Stanislavsky was developing something he called the “Method of Physical Actions,” which very few outside of Stanislavsky scholars are even aware of. We became fixated on truth, as if this was all acting consisted of. An Italian theatre scholar once asked a bunch of us if we could explain the difference between American Stanislavskyism and Russian Stanislavskyism. If his system was about ten things, our understanding of it was just one of those ten.

So we tend to be preoccupied with truth and not theatricality; truth and not physicality.

I don’t say this as a person who has studied the syllabi of acting studios or college acting classes. I say this as someone who sees the fruits of that work in the recently trained young actors, demonstrated by thousands upon thousands of audition pieces.

Many years ago I met a young Russian actress and asked her what the difference was between acting in Russia and the US. Her answer was actually not the answer I expected (and it was funny). She said in her thick accent, “In Russia, there are just three theatre schools and they are very hard to get into. In America, everyone is actor.”

Most of the audition pieces that I see are actors trying to be sincere and truthful. As if that is the goal. Ironically many of these actors have trouble with truth. They either have a weak sense of truth or they imitate emotions that have nothing to do with themselves. I frequently think to myself, is this how this person would behave if they were actually in the situation? And frequently the answer is no. If someone has a fundamentally blunt sense of truth, I wonder if it can ever be sharpened by training.

We never see him at auditions: Bertolt Brecht

For many years I was acquainted with some excellent students in a graduate acting program who worked on the texts of Chekhov, Ibsen, Beckett, Brecht, Shakespeare. But when it came time to do their graduate audition showcase (for prospective employers), they did none of these. They did scenes from contemporary plays, with characters who looked and sounded like them, whose scenes were about relationships. Now that was probably because the professors determined that those were the kinds of roles that the actors would be up for. But I have to say that those actors were much more interesting in Brecht than they were in those contemporary plays.

An actor will almost never “play themself” in a play. But this is what I see in auditions. I see actors doing monologues that do not require any leap of character. When I cast, I am asking myself, can the actor do the role that I am looking for? Will the actor bring themself up to the level of the character, rather than bring the character down to the level of themself? Actors sometimes can play themselves, but rarely the interesting part of themselves. Rather they use the conventional, dull part of themselves. The ones who know how to use that special part of themselves skyrocket to the top of our attention.

Sometimes actors use stand-alone monologues, which someone (not the actor) has written, I am assuming, just to be used for auditions. There are books of these. The ones I see are usually jokey, and they don’t demonstrate anything. I like to cast “thinking actors,” actors who have not only read the speech, but read the play. And can tell me how they are interpreting the role, based on the what the play has to say. You can’t do this with a stand-alone piece. And none of those pieces have any complexity. They are usually the kind of speeches that would not be out of place in a comedy sketch. (I’m looking at you, Man-coming-out-as-a-leprechaun monologue.)

Also bewildering are actors doing British speeches, but not doing the British accent. I have seen the American accent used liberally in Stoppard, Oscar Wilde, and Noises Off. Just as I would not want to see an actor playing Tennessee Williams and not doing the southern accent, the cadences of British text fall flat without that accent. And that’s simply not the character. Ernest Worthing lives in England (B4, the Albany, W, actually), not the US. Once again, I want an actor willing to step into the boat and sail way out to the role, rather than just staying on the shore where it’s safe.

Perhaps these actors cannot do the accent. Then why do the speech? I’m guessing because they love the speech. But as I say, we will almost never be casting the very thing you are doing in your speech, so the question remains, can you do a character? Isn’t the fun of acting pretending to be people that you’re not?

Some actors do speeches from movies and television. This is not a good idea, because you know that the actor has watched the movie or show. So there is a model for their interpretation. And if you yourself have seen the movie, you are comparing the speech you are hearing to Julia Roberts, or Daniel Day Lewis or Viola Davis – or Ellie Kemper (Yes, I’m looking at you, Unbreakable-Kimmy-Schmidt monologue.)

I also think that audition speeches should be at a very high level of performance. For think of it this way: an audition monologue is where you can cast yourself in any role you want, and you have unlimited time to work on it.

If I had anything to recommend on choices of audition speeches, I would say find a speech from a novel. There are amazing speeches in novels and you know that no one has ever done that speech. The people listening will give you more attention because they are hearing something for the first time.

As I said in my previous blog, I’ve seen some amazing audition pieces.

I saw one brilliant actress (who I subsequently worked with) do an extraordinary comic piece. I don’t know what it was from, but the character was talking about her love, her adoration, of Barbra Streisand. This actress brought a recording of Streisand singing the song People. And she played the song while she talked about how much she worshipped Streisand and she wept – real tears - because the song was so beautiful. The fact that it was real emotion is what made it so funny. Actors will sometimes use real tears for drama and fake tears for comedy. The juxtaposition of the extreme emotion and the banality of the song is what made it hilarious.

I also saw a terrific actor do Shylock’s speech where he asks Antonio to agree to the bond of a pound of flesh. The actor played the speech as if suggesting the pound of flesh was a joke and the most outrageous thing he could think of, so of course he would not enforce it. The actor (as in all things Shakespeare) did not invent this interpretation. But he executed it brilliantly. And he demonstrated that he had a point of view about the speech.

And finally:

I also saw an actor - a singer - recently sing a song with vocal nuance. (Home from The Wiz.) This may not sound special. But you almost never hear vocal nuance at a singing audition. Singers will act the song, yes. But usually they like to show off their voices by being loud or singing high. There is rarely any delicacy in the performance of these songs. Very infrequently will a singer think, “I am going to do this really subtle vocal thing here and take their breath away.“

He did that all through the song. And it took my breath away.