Give your audition a relationship worth fighting for.
Acting in an audition
You have learned the words. You have found the correct doorway, endured the waiting room, and remembered your own name. Then you begin the scene and discover that being prepared to audition is different from being alive inside the audition. Casting director and teacher Michael Shurtleff made that difference the center of his widely read book, Audition. The practical question beneath the business of getting hired is this: what makes these few minutes a necessary human event?
Shurtleff studied at the Yale School of Drama and worked extensively in Broadway casting. His publisher's biography lists productions including Gypsy, Becket, Pippin, and Chicago, alongside film casting. He repeatedly watched actors attempt to make a role clear in very little time. That professional vantage point helps explain the book's emphasis on specific preparation: choices the people watching can actually recognize in the scene.
The teacher behind the book
Shurtleff also taught auditioning. His publisher records an auditioning course, and the authorized Audition video series presents him teaching workshop participants, discussing scenes, and working through twelve guideposts. His written advice developed alongside a practice of watching actors work and helping them make a scene more specific.
Audition, first published in 1979 in the Bantam edition, is organized around twelve guideposts: relationship, conflict, the moment before, humor, opposites, discoveries, communication and competition, importance, events, place, game and role playing, and mystery and secrets. You do not need to regard that list as twelve separate performances to insert into every scene. You can read it as a set of doors into the same encounter. If one door gives you more life, enter there and test what happens.
Applications for actors
What changes when your reader becomes someone you need? Your lines acquire a destination. The relationship gives your behavior a history and a risk. You may already know the plot perfectly while remaining strangely untouched by the person in front of you. A relationship question helps you discover what a line costs you, what you hope the other person will understand, and what you cannot afford to lose.
What happened just before your first line? You can answer without manufacturing a page of biography. Perhaps you have been interrupted, have almost escaped, or have waited too long for an answer. You choose a possibility the text permits and notice whether you arrive with momentum. The scene can begin before you speak.
Humor and opposites let you question the first, most obvious reading. If you prepare a painful exchange, must every instant announce pain? You may try to charm your way out of trouble. You may find something genuinely ridiculous in a serious predicament. You may be angry and still want to be liked. You can test the complexity of your situation without decorating it with a joke or forcing a contradictory emotion because a checklist says you should.
Your audition is still a scene
You can draw a useful distinction between a strong choice and a loud choice. A strong choice organizes your attention. It makes clear what you need, from whom, and why now. Volume may follow, but it is not the evidence. If you whisper merely to appear subtle, your whisper can be as empty as a shout. If you ask for something you urgently need, even a small adjustment in your partner may become an event.
For your own rehearsal, take a short scene and name the relationship, the immediate conflict, and what has just occurred. Play it once. Then change a single assumption that the text leaves open. Ask a watcher what became clearer. Your result is useful when it makes the scene more specific and leaves you able to listen.
How you read Shurtleff now
Audition reflects an earlier casting era. You can separate its dramatic questions from period-specific descriptions of professional practice. For present submission requirements, follow the actual instructions for the audition in front of you. For the scene itself, keep testing relationship, urgency, surprise, and the possibility of change. Reading a popular book does not guarantee a role. It can give you better questions with which to prepare.
You finish with the same practical responsibility you began with: bring a human encounter into the room. Let the preparation give you something to pursue. Let the person opposite you affect the pursuit. If you can do that, your audition has become more than evidence that you memorized the material.
Read further: Michael Shurtleff's Audition at Penguin Random House.