auditions

I’ve been to a lot of auditions. You go in, you show them what you can do, and then you wait to find out if you are what they were looking for. In a good audition you get some feedback, some sort of indication that you’ve caught their interest and hopefully some suggestion about what it is they want; we tend to call this directing. Finding and inhabiting that narrow space in which what you are overlaps with what they want is the holy grail of any audition. My favorite audition story may be from a show titled The Endless Adventures of MC Cat (or, How to Get from A to B). The director was trying different pairings of actors and characters and I was reading a comic role, Slow Poke, a chronically depressed, sexually ambiguous cowboy who’s been on the trail forever. I’d read it through a couple of times and was getting a good response when the director switched up the pairings one more time, keeping me in the same role and giving me my all-time favorite bit of direction, “less Eeyore”. Of course, that was many, many years ago.

Somehow, I once again find myself auditioning. I’ve been a lay reader for several years, and with the move and the new job it simply seemed prudent to get licensed locally in the event an emergency substitute was ever needed. The matter of licensure is only ever as stringent a matter as determined by local custom, but I’m the kind of girl who likes to dot her i’s and cross her t’s. Thursday night I stayed late to attend a lay reader "training session", although there’s been a good deal of discussion in the office about actually using these sessions to help prospective readers discern if this is something they are really called to do. Let me tell you, I was really nervous about it.

Not the reading part, that part’s like breathing; and not the discernment, either, given that I have no intention of joining the rotation of regularly scheduled readers. No, what had me worried was the scent I could catch when the wind would blow from a particular direction that what was really being sought and encouraged through this exercise was an expressive approach. I spent hours at home counseling myself to keep my mouth shut and do what I knew I would be asked to do. I doesn’t matter that I draw a sharp and distinct line between performance and worship. This isn’t about my tastes, or my preferences, or my sensibilities; this is just another part of new job orientation—like the mandatory sexual harassment lecture and the OSHA required workplace safety video.

Except it isn’t. I made it through the opening statement which bore a striking similarity my lecture notes from seventh grade advanced acting: don’t just read your part, read the whole script; convey your particular interpretation; use your voice to help identify who’s speaking—oftentimes several different people in a single passage, so try different voices…and it went on. I kept my mouth shut as three competent readers climbed into the lectern and read with clear simplicity, and climbed down from the lectern looking slightly stunned by the coaching they’d received: make your voice go up and down, make it sound more “awesome”, make it more “mystical”. Then I read; and as I expected, I got the same sort of “let your voice tell me what you think about it” sort of notes; it’s too subtle, make it bigger; push it to the extreme; emote. So, I did. I stopped just shy of the sort of caricatured reading I might do for developmentally challenged toddlers, but well past the way I would read the Word of God in his own house. I got an enthusiastic response from my coach, and encouragement to take it even farther, yes! that’s what he’s been trying to tell us all evening.

That’s when I broke. I told him I could take it a lot farther, but I would never read scripture in the context of worship in the way I’d just done it for him. I tried desperately, and unsuccessfully I fear, to reign in the blazing hostility I felt at being pushed to do something I believed to be so utterly wrong as to border on the profane. He heard me. He challenged me to question the purpose of reading scripture aloud without expressive interpretation; I countered that interpretation was the function of the preacher, not the lector. Here I was, the one in the group who came closest to giving him what he sought and I stubbornly refuse to do it again. I can’t claim that either of us is absolutely right, only that we each held fast to our separate views as we struggled to remain cordial while watching the holy grail slip away.

Not my best audition.

Now, as if that’s not enough, I also made loose arrangements on Thursday to meet tomorrow with the Director of Music and the Organ Scholar for a formal audition to sing with the volunteer choir. I’ve missed singing since I came north. Imagine—or perhaps you don’t have to—that you have a stable exercise routine: twice a week you go into the gym and stretch and warm-up (vocalise), then do a comfortable cardio regimen (working on the pieces you have in your repertoire), a little weight training (the new, challenging music you’re not sure whether or not you like), and you finish the whole workout by rewarding yourself with a some time in the sauna (otherwise known as hanging out with the choir). I’ve had that routine for a long, long time and I miss the discipline.

I made some small noises about singing when I first arrived on the scene, but it can be a dicey thing balancing a musical life with your professional and private lives and I had no idea where to start searching for a choir. As the ache to sing grew stronger, I broke down and broached the subject more directly, making it clear that I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone, but I needed some help finding a place to sing. It would have been so much easier to find a gym. The recommendation came back that I (come by sometime to) try the volunteer choir (at least for the short term) so that the DoM would have the opportunity to assess my skill (and be better able to help me find the right place for me) and (in the meantime) I’d have a place to sing. It made good sense. The trouble was in trying to squeeze myself into the parenthetical phrases; curvy as I am, it’s still hard to do. More time passed, until I was preparing the Fauré Requiem for All Souls’ and couldn’t stop singing Libera me, Domine under my breath. There comes a point quando coeli movendi sunt et terra and we are forced to confront that God leaves it to us to liberate ourselves from our terrestrial prisons; all I had to do to escape mine was open the door. So, I arranged a sit down with the DoM and he outlined for me what kind of commitment he’s looking for from choristers and the details of the formal audition process.

Um, okay. I take this moment to remind myself that nothing worth having comes easy. It’s not that the audition process is so terribly stringent. I believe the phrase he used was that when they started the volunteer choir a year ago they took anyone with a pulse. However, it does, necessarily, require singing. Alone. With him and the Organ Scholar. They are nice guys; I like ‘em a lot, but there is a reason I’m a choral singer. Successfully or not, I strive to blend my voice completely and seamlessly into the larger sound of section and choir. I want to be wholly active in the ecstatic moment of singing and to disappear utterly at the same time. Singing alone, being heard individually is something I’d just as soon avoid and the moment I’d made the commitment to audition for the choir I felt a hollow lightness rising up from my solar plexus. Something of what I was feeling must have registered on my face because the DoM asked why I’d suddenly changed. Anxiety, I told him, akin to the feeling one has before a visit to the dentist’s office. Well, he said brushing aside my nerves, it’s not as though it’s a visit to the gynecologist! Less Eeyore.

Then there are the other auditions, the never ending cattle calls as you try to meet new people in a strange city, constantly searching to discover that narrow place where who you are overlaps with what they’re looking for. I keep forgetting that the audition isn’t over; every time I think it is I get a new note, another bit of direction, and once again I come to the realization that I haven’t gotten the part yet; I’ve just been called back again. This time it’s too broad, next time too subtle; first too sharp, then too soft; make it bigger, but don’t overwhelm us; more depth, but not too complex; it’s got to be personal, but accessible; hold for laughs, but don’t lose the rhythm. Cold readings, improvisations, well-rehearsed monologues that I worry have gone stale. Maybe it’s time for new headshots. Or a new agent.

The trouble is I stopped acting many, many years ago.