Auditions!

So, we had a full day of auditions yesterday.

We all arrived to Second City early to settle in and meet Joe. Joe gave us a run-down of what we were going to do for each of our four sessions of auditions: actors come in, actors introduced themselves and announced their favorite breakfast cereal as a kid, actors did brief improv scenes with two or three people, actors then were called out in threes to do ninety-second scenes, and actors then got assigned to do cold readings of sketches.

Speaking of sketches, Joe had a list with two sketches for each writer as a short list for the show.  There were no big surprises from the selections, but since I cannot remember all sixteen, and don't want to give anything way, I am not going to try to re-create the list.  So there.

We saw several familiar faces during auditions, and we had some good laughs from some of the improv.  We also had some good laughs from the cold readings.  It's interesting to see other actors' takes on the roles.  We've been together as a group for a while, and I think we assign roles to people in class having an idea of how they might read them.  That goes out the window when complete strangers get assigned the roles.

After all the rounds of auditions were completed, we had some difficult decisions to make: the actors' information had to be put into three piles: yes, no, and maybe.  Some actors were put in the "conflict" section: Life events cause you to miss too many rehearsals? Out. Missing for a show? Out.  Missing for the first reading of sketches? Out.  Missing an hour of every rehearsal?  Out.

We had a fair amount of consensus on putting people into the piles.  We then went to a conference room to whittle it down to three men (and one alternate) and three women (and one alternate).  We decided on the three women fairly swiftly, but there was some short debate about the alternate.  We also selected two of the men fairly swiftly, but then had three more candidates for two spots.  We debated.  We politicked.  We finally narrowed it down.  The process was surprisingly painless.  Joe told us that the process takes longer when people are set on a particular actor and won't budge.  We didn't have that dynamic, thankfully.  On the whole, our group does a good job of keeping drama to a minimum.  Whew.

I've been on the other side of the table as a prospective actor.  Doing the decision making is certainly easier, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be.

Next time there will be actors to introduce!