Nailing the College Audition

BY Belinda Bremner

Don’t be scared. This above all. As with any audition, the auditors really want you to be wonderful. They are on your side completely. They realize that they have asked you to do a very difficult thing. They’ve asked you to come in to meet total strangers whose decision determines where you will spend the next the four years (years which will have a profound effect on your life) and with poise and talent to greet them as yourself and then proceed to have life and death encounters with people who aren’t there as people, to be completely open and vulnerable for five minutes and then zip your soul back up and ask about work study, student housing and whether your AP credits will transfer. They know they’ve asked something really hard and they take that into consideration, at least any with whom you would want to spend four years and the equivalent in tuition of the combined national debt the free world.

To make it easier for you, they give you guidelines. The first step on your road to acceptance is to follow any and all directions. Following the directions speaks volumes, especially when you only have minutes to let them get to know you. Follow the time limits. Follow the selection guidelines. And be polite and pleasant while doing it.

We want to get to know you and yet we ask you to act and sing as other people. What’s with that? How do you deal with that? Well, you are the very best you on the planet, so show us you. Singers should pick songs in their own key and with their money notes. The same rule applies to actors and their pieces. Choose a piece that shows us you—your humanity—and that speaks for you. Choose a piece that is age appropriate and to which you really relate. You do yourself a great disservice by choosing pieces that are too old for you. No one at 17 should know enough to really understand Blanche Du Bois. Do what you know. You know so much. You know things we have forgotten and which you can rediscover for us.

Speak to the things about which you are passionate in words that you yourself would use. Don’t lecture. Fight to change that other person’s behavior because your world will explode if you don’t. Yes. Really. Especially in your comic pieces.

Don’t choose pieces that are all about how clever the piece is and which have no humanity. No 60 second “Gone With the Wind.” And please don’t do pieces from movies that have some star’s DNA all over them from now until the end of time.

Don’t do pieces in dialect. We want to hear your voice. Don’t choose pieces, in which you are insane, or an animal, or a fairy. Be a person, a real person talking to another real person who is awake, alive, and in the same room. That lets out phone calls, soliloquies, speeches over or to a corpse, or invocations of the Almighty or forces of darkness. Speak to that other person to affect specific change in his/her behavior. WANT SOMETHING and then fight for it. Wanting and fighting do not mean yelling. Yelling isn’t acting. Anger is the easiest emotion to access so show something else, or show anger that you are fighting to overcome in order to get what you want. Cast everyone: the person to whom you are speaking of course, but also every single person about whom you speak.

Contrasting pieces? That doesn’t mean that the auditors will require oxygen after your comic piece and additional Prozac after your serious. Just you when you have the answer and you when you don’t. You on a good day and you on a bad one. Don’t attempt Shakespeare if you haven’t been well trained in it and then don’t, for all that is holy, put on some fakey voice.

Don’t try to shock the auditors. Remember, they are sitting through hours, days of auditions. An endless danse macabre of monologues all about bodily parts and their functions and malfunctions is no one’s idea of a good time and leads to after hours self-destructive behaviors among the auditors.

Under no circumstance do any of those miserable monologue book “my boyfriend had three beers under the bleachers instead of going to Biology class and crashed his father’s car and he’s (sound of sob) dead and now here I am in the ER holding his sweater and I think I’m pregnant” monologues.

How do you find a good monologue? READ. Read lots of plays. How do you know which ones to read? Go to plays and ask your teachers for suggestions. And ask your teachers/coaches for help and then actually listen to them.

Practice. A lot. You need to live with your monologues. This is one place that must be a procrastination-free zone. Get those pieces into your bones so that you can “behave” instead of “act.”

Be honest and true and real and you. Be polite to everyone. Be as relaxed as you can be by being as prepared as you can be. Research your schools. Know what questions to ask. Have your pieces so ready and second nature that they can go where the day sends them.

Enjoy the audition. It’s your chance to act that day. Show us your joy. You walk into the room and we don’t know each other. You show us your joy, your commitment and discipline, your humanity and wit and passion to perform. That’s what we are looking for because those are the gifts we cherish and want to share with our students. Now we have them in common. And now there is no reason in the wide world to be scared.