The Callback and the Waiting

Ugh. The great news is that I got a callback for the play I auditioned for on Monday. The bad news is that now I'm waiting. I hate waiting...

I found the blog of the woman who is the playwright and director for the show...and it appears that casting is complete. However, I have not heard a word. From her blog, I linked to the blog of a guy who auditioned the same night as I did and was also at callbacks. As of about 4 hours ago, he is still waiting to hear as well...and I KNOW he will be cast, so there is still hope. Regardless of the outcome, I'm glad to have found their blogs due to my obsessive impatience. I learned that I really like the director, and hope to have other opportunities to audition for her in the future. She is quite a prolific playwright of children's theater and seems to genuinely love working with kids. I also learned that I like that guy too...he is also a rather prolific playwright and talked about Genesis and Adam and the significance of being named as it relates to discovering who your next character will be.

The callback was once again an entirely new experience. This time, we were all in the room together and got to watch each other do scenes. I really like that set up - I think it adds an element of friendly competition that can be incredibly motivating. There were only two people that I recognized from the first audition...one was one of the cute girls who had given me the thumbs-up. We smiled at each other and said, "Hi." We were all given scripts and a schedule of how the evening would unfold. I saw that I would be reading for two characters, the witch (which would be the most FUN of course) and the mother of 6 (which would be ALMOST as fun). The first scene the director had us read was one with just the children. And then I was up, reading as the witch twice with two different delicious little slave girls. I have this vision for the witch that is a combination of the White Witch of Narnia fame and Milificent of Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I though I did pretty well. HOWEVER, there was one other adult woman at the callback and she read the scene after I did. And she was fabulous! Really amazing...it was really humbling to watch her. She took a very different approach, but she was so natural and comfortable with her movements and her timing was phenomenal. It really was quite an education watching her; that's another reason why the all-in-one-room audition format is so great...it's an incredible opportunity to learn from other (real) actors. Honestly, watching her do the part made me feel fairly silly for thinking I could pull it off. Although, I do think I could pull it off...I just need to learn to be more physically comfortable on stage. Of course, that's where direction helps.

Then we read a scene with the Mother and the Father and the Neighbor. That scene was nice and went fairly well, but I felt like I really just "read" it as opposed to "acted." The guys who read the scene with me were amazingly talented and I felt like a bit of a hack...I was painfully aware of how my face was not interested in reacting the way I wanted it to. Somehow the nerves in my stomache were also telling the nerves in my face how to behave. In the words of Charlie Brown: "My body and my brain hate each other."

And so, I wait...nervously and impatiently...growing more doubtful with each passing moment. I mean, if I were "in" wouldn't someone have told me by now? There were supposed to be three adult women at the callback but only two of us were there. And as far as I can tell, there are only two roles for adult women. Which could be good, but that third really could be someone the director knows well and is wonderful and therefore is a shoo-in. I hate being analytical. It's exhausting.