I just recently auditioned for my first play in college, Amadeus, and let me tell you: I was not ready for this experience. It is vastly different from any of my former high school productions. The biggest difference between college and high school theater is the talent level. All of the people who auditioned here were such talented actors and actresses. I was honestly in awe at a lot of their performances, and it was basically their first times reading the lines. I was so impressed. I was honestly a little envious.
I wished that I was as good as the rest of them; their talent forced me to be better or fail. When I did my first reading, I was a little uncomfortable, I wasn't really sure what to do, and I wasn't really confident in my ability. The lines and the actions were incredibly strange. I'm not opposed to strange actions, but for whatever reason I wasn't expecting them. I wasn't expecting Mozart to be so strange.
As the audition went on, another major difference between high school and college theater is the amount of time we had for auditions. For most of the men, the audition went until about ten o'clock that night (a little later for some). The auditions lasted about five hours. In every high school show I did, we were lucky to get five hours of rehearsal. Our auditions lasted only about two hours or so tops. Having such long auditions here allowed for the actors to get comfortable and perform better with substantially less stress -- at least it did for me.
As the hours went on, I was enjoying the auditions more and more as people were performing better and the ideas of who would get what roles were becoming more and more distorted. It was a toss up, the roles could have gone to anyone. It made me fall in love with theater all over again; all of this talent in one room -- it awed me. I hope I get to perform with everyone in that room again, even if it is just for auditions.
Seeing two people take the same character two totally different directions is my favorite part of theater, and everyone has a different idea of how a character should act. They interpret their words differently, and they bring something different. I saw a lot of that, and I loved it. It was amazing to see two artists expressing their thoughts through a character. It was amazing.
Theater brings people together, and every time people are performing together something magical happens. There is almost always a moment when what you are watching feels real. I sometimes can't tell that they are acting. It's done so perfectly, it is real, true art in the flesh; it draws out so many emotions from me that I don't know how to respond. That is the point of theater: to illicit an emotional response from the audience.
