Surrender In The Room

When I started acting in Hollywood I believed every audition was a potential Golden Ticket. All my fortunes could change overnight based on my interpretation of a few pages of dialogue.
All I had to do was learn my lines, come up with interesting behavior for the character, make bold choices, be believable, cry on cue, hit all the beats and land all the laughs. Oh, do be personable and engaging during the small talk pre and post audition. Take improv to sharpen my wits, keep a few jokes in my pocket. Make them want to be my friend, my lover, my mentor or guru.
These were all things I heard over the years, either from friends or in workshops and classes. I tried what might fit leaving the rest like scattered rejects in a sample sale fitting room; the wreckage after the desperate storm of looking for the glass slipper that would make me the belle of the ball.

I invested hours divining what the writer or director envisioned and then I poured my creativity into merging that speculative vision with my interpretation of what I saw on the page. It was all spectacularly convoluted.

I am sensitive and empathetic but I can’t read minds. My creative instincts serve me well but I can’t predict another actor’s choices. I’m pretty skilled at dissecting a scene but I can’t conjure what the writer saw in their mind’s eye when they wrote the words. That is a shit ton of moving parts to orchestrate and control.
And none of it is the actor’s job.

There’s a lot of bad advice on how to audition successfully. There are some absolute Dos and Don’ts – happy to list them, just ask – but so much advice distracts from the actor’s primary job. Create a life from words on a page. The audition process is a separate beast from the craft of acting. It’s taken a long time to find the beauty in it.

I’ve been auditioning for over twenty years. I’ve been stunningly good and bad at it. I have put heart and soul on the line, blown producers away and not gotten the role. I have been driving home mid-post mortem of a failed audition when the call comes saying I booked it. There is no algorithm.
Prevailing advice was “leave it in the room”. I left the audition in the room, but I hung on to the expectation of a call from my manager. At times it was a near physical craving, like an addict jonesing for a hit. I had to keep distracting myself from that gnawing want. Letting go takes will and effort. It is exhausting. I had to let go of perfection. Perfection meant booking the job, which meant success. Failure becomes burdensome.

Surrender is the gentle cousin to the ‘uncle’ of letting go. Some may call it semantics but there’s a subtle vibrational difference. We are energetic beings so the difference matters I say. To surrender is to release without resistance. To not fight tooth and nail against the tsunami of uncontrollables. Surrender must begin in the room. Trust my craft will support me, I surrender to the waves of creativity, open to whatever foreign shore I might find myself. I’m liberated from the chatter and noise of my inner director and just flow. When I reach the opposite shore of the scene my job is done.

After two decades I am falling in love with auditions again. They are an opportunity to practice my craft and keep honing my skills. It’s like being an Olympic gymnast who bounds onto the mat, gives her most authentic representation of herself while executing the mandated moves and nailing her landing. She leaves it on the mat and up to the judges. Trying to hack the audition process is like trying to crack the Russian judge.