An Hour as an Actor

Audition season brings anxiety, racing from appointment to appointment, long hours of reading/re-reading scripts, rehearsing monologues & sides, trying to calm nerves before the auditors...all in order to land the part. I have been trying to focus on the POSITIVE part of auditions (which generally scare me to death) - for that minute or 3 or 5 or nearly an hour, I get to do what I love: embody another person, another story, play, use my muscles-brain-body-voice-allthosehoursoftraining. Today, I got to play with a room full of other actors - a rarity in straight theatre auditions for me (not callbacks, not dancecalls - a general audition). We warmed up, worked on commedia characters - attributes & appetites, some of us did monologues & all of us did scenes. Today, I got to play for nearly an hour as two characters in a play after warming up as a number of stock commedia characters. It was the best hour of today.