For Her Part, Actress Plays Audition Odds

You can be sure of only two things at your audition: the head shot and résumé. These you can prepare well in advance, although you will not notice the typos until the moment you're handing them over.

Audition advice books are full of résumé and head-shot hints that you have not followed. The more pre-audition time you spend with your photo and résumé, the more you begin to hate them and everything they say about you. The big issue for beginning actors like me is the unbearable whiteness of the résumé. Thankfully, there is the "special skills" section, for facets of your talent such as an ability to imitate a pelican very well (this is, for real, on my résumé) and to burp on command (this should be). Your head shot cost as little as possible, and is from three hair colors ago. As for the name printed in large bold type -- why don't you have a stage name? Your name is long and weird and, from a historical standpoint, is associated most prominently with one of Hitler's generals.

Hitler. Maybe that'll make them remember you.

By 10 a.m., three of us had wormed into the 11:30 time slot. So, as the audition manager recommended, we went off to discover Bethesda.

At a nearby park, we found three gazebos with good acoustics and commandeered them, one apiece. Mothers positioned themselves between us and their strollers, watching uncertainly as we did unnerving things. My warm-up consists of releasing my belly and neck, increasing head resonance, reciting my monologue, doing tongue twisters and doing spine rolls. I expanded my circle of awareness. I made this noise: huh-hummmmmmmmmmaaaaaaah. On the way back to the theater, we earned more respect from the citizenry: We were the ones barreling down the sidewalk, chanting "aluminum linoleum."

A man whose name tag said "Mama Duck" led us underground to the area labeled "Actor Holding." We loved Mama Duck, because he told us what to do in clear, idiot-proof detail. Apparently, he is accustomed to dealing with extremely nervous people. He spent two minutes describing the process of getting from the wings to the stage, a matter of 10 feet and four steps. "It's easier than it sounds," he assured us. No one, he said comfortingly, has yet "tested the gravitational constant."

There were fat people waiting to perform, and skinny people, and attractive people, and hideous-looking people, and people in their teens, and people in their seventies. There were first-timers, like me, and people who've probably been doing this since the league auditions began, during the Carter administration.

Actors are overly dramatic people (we might, for example, compare perfectly ordinary, safe events to being mauled by a tiger) who are trained to believe that their every emotion is useful. Yes, panic can plant its foot in our faces. But we can also use the panic, the exhaustion, the self-consciousness. We can let these things coalesce into a weary sense of calm and logic. We can observe, as our time to audition draws near, that it is unfair to explain what we do in terms of a tiger and death.

When it's your turn, you are clear-eyed enough to know you will not be mauled. At the very, very worst, you will be humiliated to a degree that will haunt your dreams for the remainder of your days on Earth, extinguishing all creative impulse, consigning you to a prosaic life of unfulfilled dreams culminating in a death that will come as a mercy. But you won't be physically torn apart.

The league auditors were extraordinarily polite. The house lights were on, so I could see them (there were about 50). They were not eating, or talking on cell phones, or sleeping, or chatting, or obviously bored. Come to think of it, they have more at stake. I would take pretty much any job any of them might offer, but they are looking for the one most right person for each part. If and when I fail to get a part, I can stop thinking about it, and I have a bevy of explanations besides lack of talent that I can choose to believe is the reason. But a caster who fails is stuck with his choice.

Acting is all about making choices. My choices to get up obscenely early, to memorize a wretched monologue, to act under my birth name, all placed me in the position to walk the treacherous, carefully explained distance from the wings to the stage and smile as I told them who I am and who I will pretend to be. I looked at my feet for strength, and shifted my weight, and began. Two sentences in, an auditor tittered, and the self-analysis part of my brain shut up.

The monologue I chose is from Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing." Annie is explaining to her older husband why she had an affair with a callow young man. Much as her husband might want her to, Annie will not dismiss it as a meaningless fling: "You weren't replaced, or even replaceable. But I liked it, being older for once, in charge, my pupil. . . . I'm sorry I hurt you. But I meant it."