Philip Rayburn Smith was alone onstage at the Goodman Theatre, facing an audience of five and having a brain-boiling “heat flash.”
“I said, `I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ve lost my place,’ and I started again, making it up. My palms started sweating and my face got red and I could see (Goodman casting director Tara Lonzo) looking very disappointed,” recalled the actor, who played Midas last season in Lookingglass Theatre’s smash hit “Metamorphoses.”
During those heated moments at the Goodman 10 years ago, Smith was suffering through a full-blown audition disaster, a highly personal, cataclysmic event that’s not uncommon onstage. Tap the memories of talented, successful local actors and nearly all can recall an audition nightmare they managed to survive.
Now a Lookingglass ensemble member who will appear in “Her Name was Danger” at Steppenwolf Studio Theatre in November, Smith was a year out of Northwestern University theater school when he clutched during an audition for “The Speed of Darkness,” a play by Steve Tesich, who also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for the movie “Breaking Away.”
“I was just very green,” said Smith. Tesich, an idol of the actor’s, was at the audition, and so was director Robert Falls, “who can be somewhat intimidating because he rarely looks up from his notepad,” Smith said.
“As soon as I got there, Tara grabbed me and said, `Oh my God, you’re perfect for the role and I hope you’re memorized because no one else has been memorized and it’s been a disaster.’ “
“I had loosely memorized the piece,” recalled Smith. “There is a period when actors fool themselves into feeling they are memorized. You can do it in front of the mirror or in the car, but not when you get the heat of the audition.”
Smith was not cast. “I do better at auditions now because I keep the script in my hand. I want it not to be about memorizing,” he said.
“Everything is so heightened” in an audition, said veteran Chicago actor Mike Nussbaum, who stars in Northlight Theatre’s “Visiting Mr. Green.” Like many other successful actors, Nussbaum now auditions only rarely — theater directors offer him roles — but he recalled the tension of earlier experiences. “Working for an anonymous audience is so much easier than working for two or three guys who have your life in their hands.”
Goodman associate producer Steve Scott, who oversees casting at the theater, said: “I’ve had people who have thrown up. I’ve seen them faint or start laughing hysterically.”
Broadway veteran Ed Dixon, currently playing Zeus in “The Odyssey” at the Goodman and who has appeared in New York in “Les Miserables,” “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and “The Iceman Cometh” with Kevin Spacey, recalled an audition when he remembered the words to his tryout tune, but lost control of a leg.
Dixon, who is a native of Norman, Okla., said he was “17 or 18 and had been performing all over Oklahoma since I was in junior high” when he set off for a summer stock audition at Ft. Worth’s Casa Manana. “It was this amazing silver dome rising out of the desert, with red plush seats and lights hanging everywhere with every imaginable color of gel. I thought I had arrived at some magical place.”
After being called to the stage, Dixon “got this uncontrollable attack of nerves, which I’d never had before. My right leg began shaking like it was tap dancing and the upper part of my body froze. I heard the introduction to the song, `On a Clear Day,’ which I’d sung a thousand times, and it came out like I was a robot.
“I thought, I’ve got to make some gesture, so on the very last line of the song, my right arm shot out and my finger pointed on the word `you,’ and someone at the back burst out laughing.” Dixon “limped off” the stage, still shaking, and didn’t make callbacks. But he went back the next year and nailed his first union job. Said the actor: “I don’t think they remembered me.”
“Auditioning is one of the toughest parts of the business,” said Dixon’s fellow “Odyssey” cast member Andrew Navarro, who appeared last season in the Goodman’s acclaimed “Spinning Into Butter.” Remembering one harrowing audition for a casting agency, the 25-year-old actor recalled blowing the lines of his comic monologue about an actor blowing his lines.
“The casting people weren’t sure if I was acting because I was trying to get them to give me permission to start over, but they thought it was part of the monologue. They didn’t know I was really blanking.” Added Navarro: Auditions “can be a terrifying experience. You’re emotionally kind of naked.”
And sometimes literally naked. Scott once was casting for a company in Colorado and “this young kid was doing the speech at the end of act one in `Equus,’ which the actor usually does in his underwear. But this actor took off all his clothes and stood on the table in front of me. The most embarrassing thing was trying to make small talk to him as he left the room. What do you say to a naked actor?”
Northlight artistic director B.J. Jones got just partially naked during an audition several years ago — a bold move that bombed. He had been invited to audition for the prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, and one of his audition pieces was a monologue from the Tom Stoppard play “Travesties,” which he had done a few years earlier at Wisdom Bridge Theater.
In the play, Jones played Tristan Tzara, a leader of the Dada movement, and, in one scene, he acted out the nonsense word “dada” in various ways. “Then I would drop my trousers and shoot a moon at the audience,” recalled Jones. “It generally got a hand at Wisdom Bridge.”
At the audition, however, his physical display got “stunned silence. It was sort of like that reaction in `The Producers’ when they cut to the audience in the `Springtime for Hitler’ number and all you see are a thousand mouths agape. I did not get the job.”
For Shakespeare Repertory (now Chicago Shakespeare Theater) founding member Neil Friedman, who plays Mecaenas in “Antony and Cleopatra” at the company’s new Navy Pier theater, “the stakes were very high” when he auditioned about 10 years ago for “a major regional theater. It had contracts that were almost a year long and it was a very high-profile thing.”
He was delivering “a long speech” from “Henry IV, Part 1” when his memory failed and “I broke down into absolute gibberish. I was trying desperately to keep speaking, and reach the same emotional levels, but these animalistic sounds came out.” The man auditioning him “didn’t even make a strange face, God bless him. I kept thinking, please don’t laugh because then I’m going to laugh.”
Friedman did not get the job, but the theater representative “was very supportive. He talked to me a long time afterward,” he said.
Steppenwolf ensemble member Rondi Reed, currently appearing in the North Side theater’s “Side Man,” recalled being highly distracted by fellow ensemble member John Mahoney (now a star of TV’s “Frasier”) during an audition — “very early in the game” — for a Hollywood film.
The audition was held in Chicago casting director Jane Alderman’s office, “which had that modular furniture that was popular in the ’80s. John said, `Just follow my lead.’ We started out very bold, (but) then John went to sit down on this couch with no arm and completely rolled off onto the floor like a bug. I screamed and the whole audition went up for grabs. We walked out and John said, `I think that’s the end of our film careers.’ “
As a Steppenwolf regular, Reed now has theater roles handed to her. (She did not audition for “Side Man.”) But she added that auditioning, especially for movies and TV, can still be scary. The anxiety “never ends,” she said. “Gary (Sinise) auditions. Laurie (Metcalf) auditions. John Mahoney will lose out to Charles Durning. Gary says he loses out to Woody Harrelson. The levels go up.”
Veteran Chicago actor William J. Norris, who just finished “Stonewall Jackson’s House” at Evanston’s Next Theatre, offers tryout tips to actors in a class he teaches at Victory Gardens Theatre titled “How Not to Audition.” “That way when they don’t get jobs, they can’t blame me,” he said, joking. If you don’t want to get cast, noted Norris, “falsify your resume, don’t physically or vocally warm up, don’t know what show you’re auditioning for, don’t know who you’re auditioning for, and don’t prepare.”
Failing to prepare is a major mistake Norris admitted he made early in his career. “I showed up at an audition for the touring company of `Hair’ in a three-piece suit and sang the ballad, `What Kind of Fool Am I?’ I found out what kind because I was totally inappropriate. People thought I was another actor’s agent.”
Being prepared, however, doesn’t guarantee an audition won’t be a disaster, said Kim Wade, who will open in Victory Garden’s “Door to Door” in November. For an audition “at a really good theater in town,” said Wade, “I spent all week preparing a monologue that was perfect and putting together my costume and props. When I got to the audition on a Monday, they were running two hours behind and I waited and waited. I was late for my day job.
“When it was my turn, they said, `We’re running behind, so can you just skip your monologue and do this cold reading?’ I was like, `Wait a minute. I’ve waited two hours and I’d like my whole five minutes.’ Sometimes during auditions you’re just one big mass. They forget you’re individuals.”
According to Northlight’s Jones, being a director who conducts auditions as well as an actor has helped him gain perspective. “When you see three or four actors in a row of equal abilities, invariably one of them, because of type and energy level, jumps up and seizes the role. I believe actors cast themselves, and attitude has a lot to do with it. And if you don’t get cast, it doesn’t mean you didn’t do a good job. It means somebody else was more right for the role.”
But even being precisely the right type may not guarantee getting the job.
“At one audition I went to,” said Norris, “a bunch of us were waiting, and the casting director came in and said, `What we’re looking for is a Bill Norris type,’ then walked out. I thought, Why are they looking for a Bill Norris type? I’m here. I can’t remember the show, but all I know is I didn’t get the part. I wasn’t good enough to be me.”
AUDITION TIPS FROM THE PROS
1. Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member Rondi Reed: “Calm yourself by using deep breathing and by remembering the work you’ve done to that point. There’s a reason you’re in that room.”
2. Goodman Theatre producer Steve Scott: “Don’t look at the audition as a situation in which people are staring at you, trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. Try to look at it as: `These are my three minutes to perform on the Goodman stage.’ Have some fun.”
3. Chicago Shakespeare Theatre actor Neil Friedman: “Don’t look the people auditioning you right in the face, because a lot don’t like that. I play over their heads, like I’m looking out at a big theater.”
4. Actor Mike Nussbaum: “If you feel you’re going in the wrong direction, start over. Mostly, they’ll say yes. If they say no, I say to hell with them.”
5. Lookingglass Theatre ensemble member Philip Rayburn Smith: “Feel good about those 10 minutes, whether you get the job or not, because that’s out of your hands.”
