Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Some post-audition debauchery leads our frustrated hero to take matters into his own hands. (OK, there were a couple of other people in the bed.)
Mar 26, 2003 | When Susan Shopmaker -- the New York casting agent whose corporate icon is an overstuffed red couch -- phoned to invite me to these auditions, I asked her if there was anything I, as a nonprofessional, could do to prepare. "Absolutely nothing," she replied.
So I immediately set about doing something, which consisted of calling up Barbara Scott, the San Francisco improv guru whose popular intro class at the American Conservatory Theater I had taken three years before. Barbara offered to hold a crash refresher course for me and some friends a few nights before my departure.
For two hours between 10 and midnight, Barbara coached four of us, all nonactors, on the basics of improvisation. The first rule was no blocking. Accept whatever ideas or premises your partner suggests; practice saying yes. Keep the mind clear of plans and preconceptions. Free yourself to a constant acceptance of the present moment and a mindful retention of the recent past. Endow your partner and your setting with physical attributes. Don't try to be funny or clever. Don't be afraid of silence; once a character has been defined, his or her silence has great emotional depth.
Most of the session was review for me, but Barbara offered one or two tidbits I didn't remember from class. One that would have a substantial impact on my auditions was the mantra, a method of conjuring a mood or affect by silently repeating a simple phrase. Barbara introduced this during a scenario that had stalled badly. "OK, you're not having enough fun," Barbara interrupted. "When this happens, use this mantra: 'This is fun! This is fun! This is fun!' Sometimes I will be onstage screaming this inside my head. It will always turn the scene around."
To demonstrate the power of mantras, Barbara did an experiment. First she sent me out of the room and had me come back in as though I were entering an audition. Then she asked me a rapid-fire series of questions in a hostile monotone: "What's your name? Where are you from? What do you like about it?"
I was able to answer the first two coherently, then stumbled through the third. Without critiquing my performance, Barbara sent me out of the room again, now assigning me to spend some time repeating a mantra before I returned: They like me, they like me, they like me, they like me...
"What's your name?" Barbara barked when I came back.
"Paul Festa," I answered, smiling.
"Where are you from?" she snarled.
"I'm a California boy," I replied easily. "I was born and raised in San Francisco."
"Oh, really, how nice. Mariah Carey as the next Bond girl. Why?"
"Well, who else is going to fuck her?"
The class cheered.
Friday morning I woke up two hours before my first audition and immediately reached for my mantras. Shaving in the shower, wolfing down two overcooked pork chops for breakfast, riding the 2 Express from Chambers to 14th Street, hiking across town and up to the casting office on Madison Square Park, I practiced them in combination: They like me, this is fun, this is fun, they like me, this is fun, this is fun, this is fun...
When I arrived, three or four guys were loafing in the waiting room. We made small talk; in the lulls I silently practiced my mantras. Then John Cameron Mitchell walked in.
"OK, let's have you --" He pointed to "Keith," a burly, conventionally handsome L.A. guy who in his video had sat naked in front of a huge American flag and narrated a kidnapping fantasy come true. "And you." He pointed at me.
Keith and I followed the director down the hall and into a small room where Rob and his assistant on HBO's documentary in development had their cameras trained on a somewhat battered gray love seat.
Keith and I sat down and John gave us our first scenario. "You're in the waiting room out there," he said, "and you've just watched the audition videos. And you know that once you're called into the room, you're going to have to kiss."
The conversation started off woodenly as we compared notes on the videos and gave each other our vital stats. "How old are you?" he asked. "Thirty-two," I answered. "What about you?" "Oh, I'm 36," he said. "I'm really old."
"Well at least you're not as old as John," I said. "I think he's, like, 39."
My left ear curled listening for a laugh from the director and encountered silence.
My second audition was with the only other San Franciscan candidate, a mixed-race boy in his mid-twenties named Jarrad whom I've kissed at a few parties and clubs back home. Jarrad, whose alter ego Suppositori Spelling is the reigning Miss Trannyshack (new wave drag's highest honor west of the Hudson and north of Sunset Boulevard) has no recollection of those encounters, but acknowledging some alcohol-induced memory loss, does not categorically deny they took place.
After Jarrad and I had performed the same initial exercise, discussing the tapes and our upcoming audition, John pulled me out into the hallway to give me my instructions for the next scene. The premise was that I was calling up a phone sex line in order to enact a rape fantasy, that is, that I wanted to be raped. Jarrad, playing the phone sex operator, was given his own instructions out of my earshot.
I started off trying to take this one seriously. I adopted all the poses of what Barbara referred to as low status -- eyes downcast, toes pointed inward, brow furrowed -- and with great pathos tried to convey the message, without spelling it out, that I wanted the phone sex operator also known as Suppositori Spelling to take me against my will.
As if that weren't a steep enough challenge, Jarrad blocked me at every turn. Every offer I made, he dismissed; the best I could get from him was indifference. He was only following directions, it turned out -- his assignment was to be a phone sex operator at the end of a long day, who's bored with his job in general and anxious to finish up with this call in particular.
"You're trying to humiliate me, aren't you?" I asked after Jarrad roughly blocked me for the fifth time in a minute.
"Yeah, whatever," he replied.
"It's OK -- I deserve to be humiliated." Then I let my eyes go out of focus into the distance and declared solemnly: "I have low self-esteem."
The director howled with laughter.
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