April 10, 2002
It's unfortunate when a show keeps you waiting a long time to audition. Nobody benefits. The actors get grumpy and lose focus and so they do a bad job, hurting their chances of getting the show. And the production suffers because they're not getting everyone's best work. The process of casting a pilot is hard enough without making your potential cast sit in a waiting room for up to two hours before coming in to audition.
For me, the battle becomes personal. "How dare they do this to me?" I ask myself. "They have no respect for me. They have no respect for actors. I should show them who's in charge. I'm leaving." But then, if I don't really have anywhere specific to be, it seems foolish and pig-headed to just storm out. So I don't leave.
"What are they doing?" I ask myself. "They are taking in one actor every ten or fifteen minutes and the scene is only one minute long. There has to be a way to streamline this process." So I go through how I'm going to give them a piece of my mind when I do finally get into the room, explaining to them all of these important and valuable points about keeping actors waiting. But then, is saying anything going to get the last two hours of my life back? No. So I don't say anything.
That leaves me with my only weapon. Being passive aggressive. I walk into the room and I'm not friendly. I deflect the small talk and don't respond to their repeated apologies about keeping us waiting. But I don't explain why I'm behaving that way, forcing them to figure it out, leaving them with the nebulous notion that I'm probably not a nice person, making it more unlikely that I would ever get the job. Then, I perform the scene without letting go of my indignance, making the scene stiff and uncomfortable, so that my acting doesn't rise above this unpleasant demeanor I have created. It's brilliant in its simplicity, and thorough in preventing me from ever getting the job.
I showed them.