Auditionee Sucess Story
Q: When did you audition at SETC?
A: In 1983 and 1984, junior and senior years of college. In '83, SETCs were in Louisville, KY (which is how I came to be so fixated on getting into Actors Theatre of Louisville), and in '84 they were in Alexandria City, VA.
Q: What roles/opportunities did you get through SETC?
A: The first year I think I got nine callbacks and five job offers. I don't remember exactly... one was at a theatre in Tennessee? Horsecave? Is that where that is? And another in Arkansas? Blackrock? Something-rock. The mind goes, it goes... And a couple of outdoor dramas, but I chose to work at Jenny Wiley Summer Music Festival in Prestonsburg, KY. I played Sandy in Grease, Cecile in Annie, and Airie in Robber Bridegroom.
The second year was a landslide: 24 callbacks and 14 job offers. The only ones I remember were an internship at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Jenny Wiley again, and Actors Theatre of Louisville – the latter being the one I chose, which was a life-changing experience.
Q: What do you remember about your experiences there? (On your blog, I saw a great story about you having a fever, getting there anyway, and getting an apprenticeship at Actors Theatre of Louisville through SETC)
A: Yes! That fevered trip was really something!
[Editor's note: Below is the blog entry mentioned, from http://thebonearchitect.blogspot.com/2010/06/i-dont-understand.html
Spring of my senior year in college, I was still stuck in my hometown, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Every year since my Sophomore year, I'd go to SETCs (South Eastern Theatre Conference) with a bunch of my classmates, and we'd all audition for summer theatre festivals across the country. Well, across the South Eastern United States. Chances were, the place you'd be working was some kind of outdoor historical drama -- like The Lost Colony in North Carolina or Tecumseh! in Southern Ohio. (A boyfriend worked at the latter; my best friend at the former.) Usually these outdoor dramas required smearing on lots of Texas dirt (a bright orange stage makeup that got in your pores and never came out) and being a fake Native American. But there were also places like The Jenny Wiley Summer Music Festival, which did rotating rep. of musicals like Annie, and Grease and The Robber Bridegroom (I worked at Jenny Wiley Junior year).
But I digress. Colleges and professional theatre programs could also be found at SETC scouting for graduate students and apprentices. And the professional theatre program where I wanted to work -- more than anything in the world -- was the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Highly prestigious organization.
I could not conceive of how I was going to get to NYC and be a professional actress. It was too far away; too big a jump. But to apprentice at Louisville, KY, and then go to NYC? That I could do. In my head it worked like this: I'd apprentice at Louisville; then they'd hire me to be in their company; then I'd meet an agent who'd recognize my talent; then I'd get cast in a Broadway show and become a big Broadway star.So getting to SETCs was imperative for me, because if I didn't get there, I couldn't get to Louisville, then NYC, then Broadway. Unfortunately in my senior year, the day I was supposed to leave to go to SETCs, I had a raging fever. I'd been sick all week. My friends were going to pick me up at 5:00 a.m., and then we'd drive to the conference in Alexandria City, VA. I woke at 4:00 a.m. to take a shower. My dad said if I still had a fever when my friends arrived, he would not let me make the trip to SETCs. Nothing I said could convince him how I HAD to go! My future depended on it! My dad was not down with my whole "I'm going to be an actress" thing. He wanted me to be a lawyer. So in his mind, me traipsing off to Alexandria City in pursuit of my dream was just a wild goose chase until I came to my senses, married a local boy and stayed home where I belonged.
I knew I'd die if I stayed in T-town. So I went in the bathroom and closed the door. And I wrapped my arms around myself, grabbing myself by my upper arms (the way you might grab someone else to shake some sense into them) -- I grabbed my upper arms and I shook myself really hard and yelled "You have got to get well NOW!" Almost immediately, I started sweating. I knew my fever had broken. By the time I got out of the shower, dressed and let my dad take my temperature again, I was at 98.6.
I went to SETCs, I did my auditions, I got a callback from Actors Theatre of Louisville (just as planned), I had my meeting with them, did my second audition, met with the head honcho, and after all the meetings were done and they told me I was going to be in the apprentice program, my fever returned. For three days -- as long as I'd needed to be healthy -- I was. And then after I achieved what I wanted to achieve, as I walked down the staircase from the audition room back to my hotel room, I felt my fever return.
Long way of saying the mind is a very powerful thing. I believe you can pretty much achieve whatever you set your sights on -- provided you can tune out all the naysayers.
Did Louisville ask me to be in their company, an agent see me in a show and cast me in a Broadway show and make me a big star? Not quite. I forget if I told the story of how I moved to NYC (via visiting a boyfriend in Germany who dumped my sorry behind the minute my plane landed in Hamburg; necessitating a return to the states, only to find my mother had eloped and moved to Hawaii and I couldn't contact her for money, so there I was stuck at JFK airport with no credit card and only a $20 travelers' check to my name -- "Well, I guess I've moved to NYC!") I did a showcase, an agent saw me and signed me. And I worked steadily as an actress for twenty years, only never on Broadway. (sniffle).
Q: What did you do after ATL in theatre?
Worked regionally with NJ Shakespeare Festival, The McCarter, the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Pioneer Theatre Company, Pittsburgh Public, Coconut Grove, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New Mexico Rep, TheatreVirginia, St. Louis Rep. and Off-Broadway in Steel Magnolias at the Lucille Lortel, at the Pearl Theatre Company and the Chain Lightening Theatre Company. I got to play the roles every ingenue dreams of playing: Emily in Our Town, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing (four times – I considered writing a how-to manual), Raina in Arms and the Man, Olivia in Twelfth Night, Sonya in Uncle Vanya, Bianca in Taming of the Shrew, Babe in Crimes of the Heart, Sylvia in Sylvia... Though I do regret never playing Laura in Glass Menagerie
Q: Were SETC auditions helpful to you? How did your SETC auditions help you get to where you are today?
A: Every audition situation is an opportunity to get better at your craft. And one way of doing that is by making a fearless inventory of your own personal failings as a performer, learning to capitalize on your strengths, committing to improve your weaknesses, and observing and mimicking successful audition strategies employed by others. In that respect, SETC is a gold mine. Those twenty minutes in that hotel ballroom watching nineteen other people audition (I hear it's forty these days) -- You're seeing a tiny little slice of life in the professional theatre world, and if you can step outside your racing heartbeat and audition terror and just watch, you can learn so much. You can't buy that knowledge.
In terms of increasing a performer's exposure (ergo, odds of finding employment) it was a terrific chance to be seen by myriad professional people (casting directors, theatre directors, professors offering graduate programs) and venues (musical theatre, Shakespearian theatre, outdoor theatre, dinner theatre, apprentice programs at Equity theaters) -- all folks to whom I would not have had access except at tremendous personal expense. Can you imagine how much it would have cost to travel to all those states to see all those people separately? Plus, all those separate auditions would have necessitated a great deal more organizational skills (and courage) than I possessed at the tender age of 19. Would I have had the guts to make all those phone calls? To write all those letters? All at a time pre-Internet and cell phones? In a word... uh-uh.
The rejections at SETC were every bit as important as the job offers. Getting comfortable with being told "no" is imperative if you hope to have a life-long career in the entertainment industry. You spend an awful lot of time oscillating between various quadrants of square one.
In more concrete terms, when you're in NYC without a signed agent, one of the few ways you can hope to get work is via the dreaded cattle call audition. SETC made the cattle call a familiar experience. Despite gloomy pronouncements that, "no one ever gets hired at a cattle call," I booked the first National Tour of Steel Magnolias through an Actors Equity cattle call. I understudied Shelby and Annelle, and when "Shelby" flew to Los Angeles for pilot season while the tour was in Baltimore, I asked The Gage Group to come and see me perform. It was a turning point in my career, and I worked steadily for twenty years after that.
Q: How and when did you move to writing?
A: In 2002, I hit 40 – a wasteland between ingenue and Ruth Gordon if you are extremely petite. (Thank you, Shelley Delaney, for that very fitting image). I remember having a conversation with my agent, Phil Adelman at The Gage Group, and he said, "We believe in you; we think you're terrific; but we don't know how to keep you busy for the next fifteen years until you start looking your age." I knew what I didn't want to do: more word processing. It paid the bills, but it was soul-sucking work.
My husband (then boyfriend), Ken Scarborough is a writer. At that time he was working on SNL, but previously he'd been head writer for the kids' show Doug and had developed Arthur (the kids' show based on the books by Marc Brown) for television. I asked him to teach me how to do what he did because, let's face it -- sitting at home in your pajamas with a keyboard on your lap and a cup of coffee at your elbow while trying to think like a nine-year old kid -- as jobs go, that's pretty sweet. Ken pulled some strings and got me a script on Arthur (thank you, Peter Hirsch), with the proviso that if my script was horrible Ken would rewrite it and Peter would never, ever hear from me again. The script wasn't horrible; Peter gave me several more scripts; and then Arthur won another Emmy for outstanding writing in Children's Television that year, and that was that.
Q: What is your current position? Head writer for the Curious George TV series? Tell us a little about what you do in that job.
A: Currently I'm writing for a new kids' show out of Spain called Let's Go Pocoyo! We worked with this company back in 2006 on the original show, Pocoyo. It is some of the most beautiful animation I have ever seen. You can get a peek at it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nas-B4ZG-28. In addition to that, we're gearing up for season three of the PBS show Martha Speaks.
Curious George just wrapped season four and five and is actually on hiatus until 2012. Kathy Waugh and I split the head writer job. She did the first twenty-five episodes; I did the second twenty-five. As head writer, you're responsible for generating story ideas, assigning them to a writer and helping them flesh out that idea into a script. From outline to final draft, there are multiple sets of notes from multiple powers that be. The head writer consolidates all those notes, figures out the best way to achieve them, and then makes them digestible for the writer -- because the producers are often withering in their criticisms and contradictory about what they want. Once you get the final draft of the script, the head writer nudges it and tweaks it (and sometimes totally rewrites it) then turns it over for animation. Because CG is a science and math show, it has to meet certain education curricula. So aside from juggling producer notes, the head writer also works with math and science advisors on what the particular lesson is going to be, and then figures out how to make that lesson kid friendly and (hopefully) funny.
For example, the advisors wanted a map show. Evidently it's important for little kids to learn to read maps. So I came up with the idea that Professor Wiseman has a miniature camera that interfaces wirelessly with a computer. (They really do make these cameras that are the size of AA batteries now.) Bill and George strap the camera to Bill's pet hamster. When the hamster escapes from the apartment, they have to use the images from the computer along with a hand drawn map to find the hamster and bring him home. After fifteen minutes of hamster hilarity, hopefully kids will learn left from right and up from down.
Q: How did your work in theatre prepare you for that? (We often talk with students about how theatre prepares you for many creative fields.)
A: Please. A background in theatre makes you infinitely prepared for any number of professions. Theatre breeds facile, punctual, perceptive, intelligent, determined, empathetic, sympathetic, fun-to-work-with, jack-of-all-trades employees. Most of us are so accustomed to working for little (or no) money, when we do light on a different profession that is actually going to pay us and for work we also enjoy – that is one lucky company to have us.
Q: Do you still act? Or do other things in theatre?
A: John Pietrowski lured me into doing a Richard Dresser play at his theatre, Playwrights' Theater of New Jersey, in February of 2009. That led to another director at PTNJ asking me to do a staged reading of a play with Maryann Plunkett and Jay O. Sanders in fall 2009. I had a blast. But in general, the only thing I do in theatre these days is buy tickets and make donations. I could maybe see myself acting again once I hit my sixties. But for now, I'm having way too much fun writing. I love that it is so... portable. And that the rejection is so very far away. It comes in an email, instead of "Next!"
Q: Where are you originally from? Where do you live now?
A: Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I currently live in Manhattan.
Q: What advice do you have for others in theatre today who are preparing to audition or interview for jobs?
Be yourself. There are a lot of people competing for that role, but you are the only one who is you. The more you can truly be you and let the uniqueness that is you shine through - the better off you'll be. Don't waste time worrying about what Joe or Jane Schmoe who went before you are doing in the audition room. It's irrelevant. Don't worry about whether you went to a league school or not. Yes, it definitely gives you an edge, but if you didn't go to one of those schools, worrying about the fact that you didn't isn't going to do a dang thing for your audition. Having worked with casting directors as a reader in auditions (Pat McCorkle, Rich Cole and Michele Ortlip), I can tell you everyone in that audition room wants you to do a good job. They are rooting for you. They are hoping you're going to walk through that door and solve all their problems by being brilliant. So be brilliant. Be punctual. Be pleasant. Be prepared. But not so prepared that you've no flexibility in your audition, because as we all know things sometimes do go "wrong."
If something does go "wrong" in your audition, do not ask to start over. It is never worth it. Try to be loose-y goose-y enough that you can just keep rolling. Often times (i.e., always) the most genuine moments are ones we didn't rehearse.
If a director gives you an adjustment or a note: Do it! Do it so huge there's no question in the director's mind that you heard the note and took it. The director can always pull you back if you go too far.
In general, don't sit through an audition (unless maybe your character is in a wheelchair). They need to see you moving.
At cattle calls, avoid angry, screaming monologues. I know we want to show our emotional range, but trust me. The angry stuff can be a turn-off. Remember, that one or two minutes of audition time may be all these people ever see of you. They know absolutely nothing about you. If you pick a psycho monologue, there's a danger casting directors will see you as a psycho.
If you decide to do a psycho monologue anyway, for goodness sake do not single out a particular casting director and perform the monologue right in his face, hurtling consonant-generated spit balls at him. (I only mention it because I saw this happen once. Really not a good idea.)
Also for cattle calls, if you can write your own monologue, it might be to your advantage to do so because if they've heard a comic monologue twenty gazillion times that day and you do it again, they may not pay attention.
Exception to the previous rule: if casting directors have heard a monologue twenty gazillion times that day and you are the only one who nails it, you will forever be a god in their eyes.
And now that I've said all that, remember – there are no rules. Break a leg!