Cate Wiley’s audition experience
It has been something like 25 years since I auditioned for a play—graduate exams and job interviews are not quite the same. I was surprised to be introduced (again!) to Michael, but after that I had a good time hamming it up with my newspaper line about “bad guys not having access to information.” I feel as if I was asked to read it about six different times and I recall running up to whisper in the ear of each auditioner. I felt brave and incredibly talented as an actor for those few minutes!
Audition Recruiting
Tuesday night was the second night of auditions. All Sunday and Monday nights we’d been canvassing for auditions – walking around the neighborhood with fistfuls of audition flyers, stopping anyone we found to lure them over to the audition room. It was exhilarating to be out in the street, steeling up the nerve to walk up to complete strangers and lay out our mission. It was our first real contact with the neighborhood, and as outsiders to the community, it was both terrifying and empowering. The number of people I met who were immediately enthusiastic about the project was unexpected to me, and inspiring. But we got a lot of no’s also – polite smiles and shakes of the head, people with “no time” or who “weren’t actors,” and nothing we said could change their minds. By eight o’clock Tuesday night, it was getting dark and I was starting to get tired. I was standing on the sidewalk outside Cornerstone with the rest of the recruiting team, beginning to start the fourth round of trying to get the couple who kept walking past us to audition. We failed, as we had the last three times, but then, a car pulled up. People jumped out, slamming the doors behind them, and I stepped forward to catch them before they sped off to wherever they were headed so quickly.
“Hey, have you heard about the play we’re doing at Cornerstone?” I asked, brandishing a flyer.”
“Yeah, that’s where we’re going!” They answered, hurrying past me.
I stopped, stunned, and watched as they rushed excitedly into Cornerstone. Gradually, more people trickled in. People walking in out of the darkening street, into the waiting room full of community members talking and laughing as they waited to audition. There weren’t a lot of them, but suddenly people were turning the tables on us, as we approached to tiredly invite them in, telling us offhandedly that they already knew. Some of the people who said they had no time but would come back later, the ones we’d given up on, were emerging from the street with excited greetings and smiles. By the end of auditions, we had 74 people. As Michael said later in class, the eagerness we found seemed to reflect a hunger in the community – for the story to be told, and to be the ones telling it. On Thursday, when we packed nearly sixty people into the rehearsal space for our first read-through, that story began to come to life.
Taiga Christie
