COMEDY - JULY 2015

Another sides-only audition. The ones the company emailed me weren’t very promising. It seemed a very silly play. And I was carrying a chip on my shoulder from a perceived snub from another theatre company I'd gotten recently.

Nevertheless I showed up to this audition with a positive outlook.

While waiting in the anteroom with a few other actors I heard some overacting in the audition room. I can’t cringe anymore. I'm familiar with this theatre and their usual style of shows. They’re probably lapping it up in there.

I go in with an actor and actress. The director has a male friend fill in for the fourth slot in the cold readings.

I am two decades older than the three other actors and the first part I read for is an elementary school student. Second time around, same scene, I play another school student.

Third time around, new scene, I play the teacher. Then we’re asked to improv a scene where we shit talk a co-worker. Since I’m not very good at improv, I spend most of the scene not making up new jokes, but merely reacting to everyone else’s.

The next afternoon I get the standard rejection email.

ANTHOLOGY SKETCH SHOW #22 - JULY 2015

A bit of backstory: I auditioned for the very first version of this sketch show oh so many years ago. I passed the first round of auditions and was invited back to the callbacks, but when I showed up to THE CHURCH* where said callbacks were, all the doors were locked and I had no number to call the company with. I trudged home though the snow, pretty pissed off. I sent a curt but polite email to them the next day explaining the situation. Their response was basically, “Shucks! Thanks for making the effort anyway!” I knew the door thing wasn’t directly their fault, but I was so ticked off that I’d swore I’d never audition for the company ever again. 

Fast forward four years:

I auditioned for two women (last time it had been two dudes). I did my “What Cops Know” monologue. I didn’t feel good about it. I felt as if I’d under performed it.

Afterwards one of them asked me to relate a story that had happened to me while on the el. I related the same story I told the last time about the punk lesbian couple’s encounter with the vulgar bro dudes. And that was that.

The next day I got the rejection email. It was written by the one who spent the entirety of my monologue looking at my resume.

A few months later I wound up seeing the show with my then girlfriend (who'd just been cast in the twenty-third version of the show). I didn't think it was good. And that ain't sour grapes talkin'.

*THE CHURCH is just that -  a church. But a lot of auditions take place here and it'll show up again in this blog.