Theatre Company A

In interest of "being nice", I won't actually mention the names of theatre companies or directors. 

"Theatre Company A" is a theatre company that specializes in Shakespeare, and puts on one show every summer.  I encountered them when my kids were involved with a Gilbert and Sullivan play, as this group uses the same venue for their rehearsals. 

This was the year I had decided that I wanted to do something more than narrate during a Christmas show.  This Shakespeare group seemed a perfect fit.  Their audition was for "As You Like It". 

I went to the audition early.  They had some sides sitting around.  A monologue was optional.  I had a monologue in mind, but I didn't feel confident that I had it memorized.  I committed that cardinal error: I went in to do the monologue holding a piece of paper. 

After the monologue, I saw more people had arrived.  Very few people went into the back to do monologues.  Rather, they took the sides and waited to be called up to do the small scenes.  This is where things got interesting.  Every single other person that auditioned was asked to go up at least twice.  Some were even called up three times.  I was only asked to go up once. 

Being asked to go up once means, in this situation, they had already made up their mind about me.  A few days later, I got a call saying that I didn't get a part.  In other words, they had already decided they didn't want me for the part, and they called me up that one time just as a courtesy.  In what I would later see is extremely rare, the woman on the phone told me that the fact that I didn't have my monologue memorized really cost me during the audition. 

I'm sure it did.  Maybe it cost me so much that they decided flat-out that they didn't want me in the play.  Maybe they saw me holding that piece of paper (by the way, I did have the monologue memorized; I kept the piece of paper because I didn't feel secure about that fact), and decided "no, absolutely not".  Did I remember to mention that a monologue was optional and that most of the people didn't do a monologue at all?  If what the woman was saying was true, I would have had a better shot with this play if I didn't do a monologue at all.  That is . . . interesting. 

Or is it that my skin is brown?  They had a good turnout, and thus could stage the show without having to explain an out-of-place brown person?  At the time, this thought never occurred to me.  And maybe it isn't fair to theorize this. 

In any case, this past spring someone asked me if I was going to be auditioning for Theatre Company A again, for "The Tempest".  My answer: no.  I'm sure they don't mind.