Chorus Line

So last night I went to see my little sister’s highschool musical, A Chorus Line. For those of you who may not know, this is the musical that takes place in the casting…of a musical. Wow. Way to comment on the medium, guys. I kind of think that maybe it was an exciting idea at the time, but…

Ok, first of all, the show is (sort of) calling into question the de-humanizing reality of auditions, like we all walk in there and dance our little dance and show them who we think they want us to be, and either they like it or they don’t, and we are either chosen or we are not. Ok, so far so good. But in this show, the director wants to see “the real you…who you REALLY are…” and so we get all these soul-searching, deep monologues and songs about Life and Performance. But then, at the end of the show, the director still makes his selection, and 8 people get cut (right in front of everyone) anyway. Now. This whole concept just pisses me off. I mean, it’s one thing to be rejected because you botched a dance step or they don’t think you are right for the part or whatever. But to show who you REALLY are and then have that person be rejected? How fucked up is that?

Because here’s the thing: I have been on both sides of that director’s table during auditions. I knew how it felt to walk into a cold room, with tiny judging faces looking at you, trying not to get too distracted by what you think they are thinking, and then doing a monologue-trying to “act,” and then leaving, having no idea whay they want or what they saw, then looking at a paper list of dreams being either broken or made true. Or something. (Sidenote: monologues are ridiculous. Acting happens between people, in a context. Doing a monologue in an audition is like trying to clap with one hand, in outer space.)

And, I have sat as a director, watching as one by one my peers became weakened by their desire to join in the club I was the self-named president of, and feeling uncomfortable with that power imbalance (but obviously I still agreed to it, so I couldn’t have been that uncomfortable with it. Power structures exist whether we like them or not…right?) I hated that they walked in there and had to perform for me like little wind-up toys, and then be manipulated into doing embarassing things (in the name of gauging their “directability”) alone in front of a group of people. (I was with some other directors. I wasn’t the one telling people to roll around on the ground or pretend a cardboard column was a beautiful woman, but someone was, and people did.)

But I don’t really have a solution. First of all, auditions are such an institutionalized form of a selection for this form, and there is a reason for this: they do serve a purpose. they are useful in a way. You do get a taste of the actor’s abilities, you know some little sliver of who they are and what they do, and you can cast or filter them accordingly. I am not saying I know a better way, I am just asking about this one.

Actually another way to cast is called “favoritism.” That one is basically you can cast your friends and people you know.  You may even choose a show with someone in mind. Of course this happens all the time, even if ostensibly you are “holding auditions.” I would be the first person to decry this favoritism if it had never served me. But of course it has. I have gotten roles because I knew someone or they had seen me or whatnot. And that is actually not necessarily bad, really. Developing working relationships is useful, for one thing.

My sister had a negative experience with this show because she wasn’t part of the main ”line.” She was pissed off to have to do a smattering of shitty background scenes, plus the opening and closing part and then that was it. She is an amazing singer but she doesn’t have dance training so, she says, that’s why she wasn’t on the line. The way they do things at her school is that everyone who auditions gets a part. So then in that case the audition process is intended to be softened, and less scary and dehumanizing. But because of the nature of this particular show, the result ended up being worse than if they had just cut people in the first place. She spent weeks working on something she was barely in. Now, of course there was the politics about who got what role and so and so has been dancing since she was in utero but she cant sing worth a damn or whatever. She was mad because she thought she could have done a better job, which sucs of course.

But I guess my overall feeling is this: auditions are brutal. And they are imperfect. But that is how it is. To try to make it into something else by either using people’s real personalities to measure their value (as in the show) or to just include them for the sake of including them, is not fixing anything essential about the problem. Don’t try to fix just one little easy part of a broken whole, because you can easily make it worse. Plus it is a cop out. (kind of like the end of this post..ehm…)