Post date: Mar 04, 2015 4:38:57 AM
March 3, 2015
Today we had auditions for our scenes. I've auditioned a few times as an actor, it was an interesting experience to be the one on the other side of the table making the casting decisions. I was actually glad I was only looking for women, it meant that I didn't have to watch the guys as critically and if I wasn't that enthralled by their monologues I could have the chance to look over at the other actors and see how they acted when they weren't "acting". I did that several times, they were very respectful of each other, which is good but it didn't help give me an idea about their personalities.
There were two or three monologues that I thought were particularly well chosen in that they seemed to fit the people and there were a few more that were done well. There were a few others who seemed nervous, which I don't blame them. But, it was during the callbacks that many of the actors really showed their versatility and made some brave choices. I was impressed by how quickly and how well they were able to take the instructions and completely change their monologues, probably because that's not something I'm good at. As a whole, they were also a lot funnier than I expected them to be. I also found it very interesting to see what my fellow directors asked them to do, and then to see where the actors went with those instructions. I didn't call anyone back because there wasn't anyone in particular I was dying to see more from, I was more interested in seeing how they all reacted to the different scenarios they got from the other directors. One thing I found particularly difficult about the auditions was that we never got to see any of them interacting the way they would in a scene, so it seemed like there was no real way to predict how their acting would change when they are onstage with more than just themselves. For example,for a few of the monologues my note I wrote down was that I thought they seemed pretty declamatory, which I guess really means that I thought they were rather stiff and disconnected from the scene and world of the play their monologue is theoretically connected to or in the middle of, especially in comparison to some of the others. I wondered how that declamatory would be different when faced with another actor, or if it would be different at all.
The two actresses I chose for my first choice cast I picked because I saw moments in either their monologue or call backs in which they were saying one thing but meaning something different. I thought that was important because it showed that they could grasp subtleties in the language like that, which is very important in my play. Though, Trifles is a lot more subtle than what I saw from either of them, but it was a start, they were closer than any of the others seemed to be. It will be my job as the director to lead them that extra step.