I am, by no means, new to the idea of being on a stage. In fact, a lot of the time, I’m quite comfortable up there.
So why, in the spring of my Junior year of high school, did I feel the need to high tail it after getting within a foot of the door for auditions for Zorba?
Because I had only ever done one audition in my life, and it was a last minute sort of thing where I had said, “Hey, director, I think I’d like to be in your play,” and the director had said, “Okay. We’ll just run your audition right now here at church.” (Now that I think about it, I may have missed the audition deadline…) Long and the short of it was that I found myself in the summer of 2000, up on stage acting and singing in The Secret Garden. And I will never forget the words to “I’ve Got A Secret” ever.
Before that, all of my stage experience was from acting camp. You didn’t have to audition for acting camp. There were various ways that you got roles – and with any real life theatre, the councilors definitely had favorites that they cast in the leading roles a lot of the time. But you never really felt like that was part of the issue. You were at theatre camp. You made friends, you had fun, and you acted. Even if (as happened to me once) you somehow got crowned king at the end of Macbeth and STILL had no idea how you’d got cast in the role of A) a king and B) a boy. I don’t think I fully understood just who I was playing when I did Macbeth as a twelve year old.
That being said, you’d think I’d have blended in with the very theatrically savvy place that was my hometown. I loved performing, but spent so much time at the dance studio that theatre was kind of not on my radar.
Then high school happened.
I chickened out for West Side Story before I’d even thought about auditions and signed myself up for the pit orchestra.
I thought about being a choreographer when the opportunity presented itself the next year with Little Me. Chickened out again – especially since I would have been competing against one of the best dancers my year had to offer. Signed up for tech crew.
You heard what happened with Zorba. And I didn’t replace being in Zorba with another backstage activity. I still don’t even know the music or anything.
But junior year of high school brought about another revelation – this time in the form of English class.
My junior year English teacher will forever be one of the most influential teachers I had as a kid. He inspired me to read. Not that I wasn’t reading already, but he made it fun. He would set aside 10 minutes at the end of every class for free reading. We had to set up meetings with him to discuss the books we were reading every once and a while, and we had to do a certain number of them per semester. It was for his class that I found myself so caught up in The Canterbury Tales that I actually forgot there was a written portion of the assignment. When he came round to check that we’d done the homework, I panicked and told him the truth. He told me it was the best response he’d ever heard for someone not doing their homework.
In any case, it was for his class that we had to read Macbeth. To state nothing of the earlier issue with Macbeth from when I had been in middle school with my theatre summer camp, Macbeth has been, and remains to this day, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. So I had a great deal of fun volunteering to play Lady Macbeth for class. It was my portrayal of Lady Macbeth going mad – something I was complemented for later in the day by my English teacher – that he decided I would be best placed in Honors Modern and Shakespearean Drama for my senior year. It was a push I probably desperately needed in the acting world, and while highly appreciated, I would not fully understand the meaning of it until years later.
So here I am, two days after my first real audition, aged 24 years old, and waiting for news on my audition for Oliver!. The day of my audition, I had thought to myself – what is acting? I love dance. Dance is my passion. But the minute I stepped up to play Nancy for my audition, I remembered what it was like being up there and playing someone else. Dance may be my passion, but so is acting. Both are telling a story – whether through movement or through words, actions.
It won’t matter how my audition went, whether I get in or not. The truth will lie in the fact that I was reminded. I was reminded what it was like to be up on that stage. I was reminded what it was like to have to be someone else for even a fraction of a second. I was reminded that their was something else I love too. And that, to be fully honest, I missed it. It didn’t matter that I was shaking uncontrollably through my scene. All that mattered was that in that moment I was Nancy, and no one else. All that mattered was that I was there, and I was actually auditioning, and that I could do it. And I did.