When you put out a casting call, especially for generals, you (well, I anyway) cross your fingers and hope that you’ll get a good number of responses, that you’ll have full days of seeing great people. After all, I think that as a director my most important job is casting. When I do it right, the rest of my job feels easy. When I’m less on with my impulses - well, the road ahead is a little more challenging.
So when we put out our casting call a couple weeks ago, I crossed my fingers and hoped that the submissions would start trickling in. And then they did more than trickle. Even though our deadline for submissions was a week ago, I’m still receiving headshots and resumes. To date, over 400 actors have requested an audition. 400. Can you believe it? What an absolute embarrassment of riches.
This is great and exciting news – until I think about how we only have about 150 audition slots. Which means that it is physically impossible for us to see more than half of the actors who submitted. And since this year we’ve moved away from the first come, first served system we’ve had in the past, we are faced with the terribly daunting factor of choice.
Anne Bogart talks about the violence of articulation (I love that phrase) and how making a choice neccesarily voids all the other options forever. Robert Frost talks about the “road not taken.” And I talk about my irrational fear of missing out. All of these things make scheduling general auditions for a non-equity theatre of limited means distressing and just–hard.
I’ve got my spreadsheet and my system (such as it is) but it feels so far from foolproof, and as a once upon a time generally auditioning actor myself, I’m feeling incredibly guilty that I can’t see everyone. Because I want to – I so very much want to! So I’m trying to Frankenstein these days together, getting confirmations from actors to try to eliminate the “no-show” factor, reducing breaks so that we can see as many people as we can, and I guess at the end of the day I’ll just have to keep crossing my fingers and keep hoping for the best. There are so many roads – and I just can’t take all of them, no matter how much I’d like to.
