I’ve been watching, reading, thinking about, and collecting Shakespeare for years. But tonight I did something brand-spanking-new in my Shakespeare fan-girlishness:
I auditioned for a Shakespeare production!
I’ve continued to stay involved in community theater in the two years since I last blogged: Broadway musicals, all of it. But through these musical projects, the hubs and I have become friends with a fellow who is the founder/artistic director of a local community theatre company—one that does an annual Summer Shakespeare production.
So, I auditioned. (Such a small sentence to capture the maelstrom of emotions I’m feeling: excitement, abject terror, embarrassment, proud of myself for being brave….)
I’m not even beginning to imagine my odds of getting cast. If I am: super-cool, that’ll be a whole new experience and perspective on my boy Will. If not: I can always try again next summer.
And, interestingly enough, even the act of filming this little audition video* made me look at Will through a different lens.
First I had to choose a monologue. Since the Summer Shakespeare in question is going to be the Henriad (IV and V), I decided to go with something from another one of the history plays. Since they’ll be doing gender-blind casting, I considered deliberately mixing things up by choose a male character–but then decided that was more stress than I wanted to put on myself. As my mind began to boggle at the tremendous wealth of options still before me, I then decided to make my life easy by narrowing the field to something from one of the histories I’ve seen, read, or thought about most recently.
Which brought me to Richard II (which we saw late last spring) and the Duchess’ “seven sacred vials” speech from 1.2.
Once I’d made that choice, I pulled the text into a word doc and went to work. Figuring out the scan: which syllables to elide, which to stretch out. Playing with the emotions of the piece, deciding where to slow down, to accelerate, where to use enjambment and where to put a clear line break—or even a biggerish sort of pause. Marking up my page with all these sorts of things.
And this was the preparation of a completely amateurish and inexperienced sort of actor—one who wasn’t even going to come CLOSE to have the monologue memorized before she turned the camera on!**
If the exercise of auditioning built so much more detailed awareness of this monologue into my system, I can only imagine the enriched understanding that real actors get from/bring to the process of textual analysis and preparation.
And I hope, when and if I ever do get the chance to be part of a production, that my own textual understanding and facility will be similarly enriched.
*Alas, I cannot be at the live auditions, because I will be in tech week for another one of those musicals.
** For the record, I was in the page WAY too much in this audition video. Next time, I’ma trying to do a better job of picking something with enough lead time to do the memorization.
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Image credit: MezzoSherri’s iPhone
A Will for Will: The Shakespeare Project 