May 2, 2002
A theater audition? What? For real? I have hoped for a bonafide theater audition in Los Angeles since the day I drove up in my Chevy Corsica nearly 11 years ago. Sure, the Gardner Stages and Theater Rapport had their charm, but what about the Mark Taper Forum and the Geffen Playhouse? Or even the Pasadena Playhouse? That's where Waverly Gallery opens in July. And today I had a shot to be in it.
The show seems interesting and the role could be good, but the audition material was tricky. There were three scenes two choose from. In two of them, DANIEL is talking to his grandmother who is hard of hearing, so most of the dialogue is yelling and/or repeating lines. Kinda crappy. And then the other scene is 11 pages long and on half of the pages, DANIEL only has two or three lines. So I had to choose the first yelling scene. It ended with a monologue, so I put some work into making that distinctive.
The scene went well and the monologue felt good, not too rushed,
which has often been a problem of mine when trying to perform
monologues when I don't really have all of the lines memorized. The
casting director, Richard Hicks, was someone I had never met before.
It was great to get a chance to read for him, but I didn't get the
impression he was going to plop me into this role.