Facing a theater full of people and belting out your deepest feelings to the world sounds frightening to most people. But I find that there is something infinitely more frightening that happens long before opening night.
The audition. The dreaded, terrifying, nerve-wracking, stomach twisting audition. Almost every actor dreads this day above all others and these are my personal reasons for why.
As an actor, I want nothing more than to get the part and convey to the audience the deeper meaning of the show, on top of the surface level idiosyncrasies of the character. But it's a long process to go from singing Christine Daae's Think of Me in the car to actually playing her onstage.
To get to that step, you have to walk into a room or theater, audition with a song and a monologue, usually chosen by yourself, that you think best fits the role you're auditioning for best. And that process in itself may take months just to finalize your choice enough to memorize it and take it into the audition space.
For example, for a recent audition, I picked at least 5 different songs before I finally stuck with one long enough to take it to the audition. As for the monologue, a thoroughly more difficult search in itself, I began looking for one about 6 months ahead of the audition and finalized my choice about a month before.
There are so many plays out there so it's hard to find the "perfect" monologue. Every actor will tell you this, monologues are a tough thing to search for. You might as well start searching for the holy grail before searching for a monologue it feels like most of the time.
But wow, that's not even the audition itself! I liken the moment before you walk into an audition with the feeling of walking onto a scaffold. You know what's about to come, and it terrifies you, but you have to still stand in line and walk to your own "doom." At least that's how it feels.
Now once you've passed over the threshold into the actual audition room, there are usually two routes that the encounter can go down. Either the production staff are super friendly and make you feel comfortable, or they stare at you in silence which makes you feel awkward because hey, you just walked into a room with a song about coming out to your parents and a monologue about losing your virginity, and you've got to tell these silent strangers all about it.
That's what theater is like. There are many productions I have performed in where laugh lines don't leave the audience in even so much as a chuckle and that feels like you've misspelled cat on a vocabulary test. Even when the auditioners are friendly and make you feel at home, my stomach is always still twisting in knots.
And here's why:
I feel so overwhelmed by my "doomsday" thoughts of how they could not like me, or my singing, or not have a part that fits me that it clouds my thoughts until the moment I perform. Ultimately, however, the worst part of auditions for me is the sinking feeling that I may not be able to perform something I would sell my own heart to be given the opportunity to play. That's the thing you have to force down until you leave that room, then let all the worry do whatever it wants at that point.
And that's it! That whole process feels like the longest in the entire theater because nothing feels longer than the 24 hours between auditions and callbacks, and the 48 hours between callbacks and the cast list. 
