The Last Night

in New York City. Talk to you all later---from beautiful (what?) Rochester, NY. Stop #1.

The Local Response

We leave in 2 days. Lord help us. No, I'm kidding. We are very prepared and very ready/excited/going to explode/in the hospital. But I have to write about how the people I know have responded to this adventure.

Put simply, I have been truly touched by the amount of encouragement and generosity I have received. This has lifted my spirits even higher. I can't wait to take the good energy I got from people I know already and spread it around the U.S. to the strangers we will meet. So thank you, everyone! I feel incredibly blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life.

Oh, and Emily bought me a yoga mat so I can do yoga with her while we are out there. That was so....nice....of her. ("A domestic dispute erupted yesterday during a yoga class..."). I'm kidding, I like it. She'll keep me healthy.

I'm excited...no, terrified...no, excited...no, terrifed...

It's hard to sleep when you are the manager of your own business venture. It is hard to feel that everything is totally under control. About a two weeks ago, I started to lose it.
The first week of panic involved getting appointments. I began to think there would be no appointments! What if this is crazy, and theaters have policies set up to prevent this and everyone thinks we are raging lunatics?
Then we started to get appointments. Lots of appointments...all of a sudden.
And I thought to myself...Two weeks before we leave? Two weeks! Oh my God, we're not ready! Why haven't we worked on our material more? What are we doing? What have we been doing? What if no one will coach us? What if we have no idea what we're getting ourselves into? Really great people are going to see us and we won't be ready!!!
Those were the thoughts that passed through my head. Time seemed to slip through my fingers like so much sand in so many metaphors. Or similies.
Luckily we had our first coaching session. It turned out that we weren't as crazy as we thought. Our fabulous professor from Brooklyn College, Mary Beth, has been generous enough to coach us and managed to boost our confidence all at the same time. We found that we weren't actually crazy, and we had managed to learn something in grad school (and absorb it to this day), and we are actually capable, hardworking, talented actors.
Acting is all about putting yourself out there, both while you are working and while you are doing "the business". In a lot of ways we have opened ourselves up by working on this project. When you open yourself you create a risk. Risk can lead to pain, but it can also lead to great success. If you don't risk, you are protecting yourself from failure and triumph. You are embracing the ordinary and turning your back on the extraordinary. As one of my favorite poems says, "Only the person who risks is free."
And so I am excited...no, terrified...no, excited...

Here are some of the responses we have received to our phone calls:

-Yes! What time is good for you?
-Give us a call when you are in town
-Give us a call closer to when you will be in town
-S/he is on vacation/in a show/directing a show/on the moon; call back next week
-Um, yeah I think we can do that
-Are you Equity?
-We don't really "do that" here
-If we saw every actor who came through town, we would be "besieged," as you can imagine
-What do you mean, "show us your work?"
-Ok, come in around 10:30. Don't worry about material, just bring your resume
-We are crazy right now. Give us a call later in the summer and I might know what I am doing by then
-Ironically, I am going to be in New York casting a show when you will be in town
-Can you come to our general audition we are holding then?

And there were other responses (Emily's responses) that I did not write. These are just the ones I had. Not bad, right? And Emily did not do too shabby either (you know, for an actor). The people were pretty damn nice. Maybe it is because their job is to create theatre, and they do it in a place that is not New York.

So we have a couple appointments in upstate New York, two in Cleveland, 1 maybe more in Chicago (that was a harder nut to crack, with their own actor community to draw from), many in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, three in Seattle (so far), and the other cities are still To Be Determined. High five!

And as I was doing my research and writing my letters and making calls, I discovered that most of these theatres were founded in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Yet another reason to love the 60s and 70s. But seriously, that must have been quite an exciting time to be an artist. Not because of the drugs (well...), but because of the spirit of that time. Ah, Bret....you're just a wannabe hippie.

Yes, I Counted

We mailed out 83 letters. Eighty. Three. Just finished the last city--Pittsburgh. Yet one more city who has won a Super Bowl, while my Buffalo Bills have not. But if these Pittsburgh theatres see us, all animosity is forgotten.
Yes! Paperwork....done.

A Note on Phone Calls.

This is Emily. And I need to say a thing or two about blind phone calls.
Here are some things I would rather do than call people I don't know on the phone.

1. Eat oatmeal.
2. Watch morning television.
3. Stab myself in the eye with my phone's antenae.

But in the course of human events one has to make a blind phone call or two. And as much as I would like Bret to make all the phone calls, he was not to keen on the idea.
To make matters worse, if that is possible, my phone reception is sketchy. In my apartment my phone consistently tells me I have full signal until just after some very important Artistic Director answers the phone, and then I suddenly have two bars! I think my phone wants my career to fail. Little does my phone know that should I fail, no one will be paying its fancy bills!
And so I sat in a cafe, thinking my signal would be better there, clutching my phone and desperatly hoping a car would crash through the window and take my life, or at least my dialing arm. I spent a few futile moments reviewing theater information and repeating my speech and swearing under my breath.
Finally I made my first call. It was just as terrifying as I had assumed it would be. In fact, the man I spoke with was quite nice, and directed me to his casting director, a woman who works mainly at a different theater (who might be seeing us when we pass through). But success, or at least friendliness, did not seem to help me feel any better about my task.
It did not help that I started with Chicago. Now, don't get me wrong, Chicago is a great city, and a wonderful theater city. The problem is, Chicago has a lot of actors, and many of the theaters in Chicago are small enough that they cannot afford to bring actors in. So I heard a lot of very friendly people tell me that when I move to Chicago I can send my headshots and come in.
I also left messages, which was great in that people did call me back. If you let people call you back, however, they will call you when they want. They have called me at 9am, they have called me in the middle of the street, they have called me while I'm in the shower. I didn't answer that last one.
I have to say, though it may not seem like it, that one of the things I am most looking forward to during this trip is meeting all of these people across the country. Most of them seem very generous, very honest, and very helpful. And I swear that I am much much more interesting face to face. My face is very nice. Or so I am told.
All in all, I'm getting better at phone calls. I must be. At least it only takes me one deep breath before I call these days.
I would still, however, rather perform in 100 naked auditions than make one blind phone call.
If only that was an option.
I bet I'd get a lot of callbacks.
Hee hee.
Naked.

A Different Kind of Letter-Writing Campaign

Hey--this is Bret writing! This is my first post ever on a blog. And it is on my own blog. I am advanced.

In case you didn't know, Emily and I finished our MFAs in Acting from Brooklyn College in June. One of our professors there, Mary Beth, suggested that a way to create audition opportunities for yourself is to do a "regional theatre tour." Write to various playhouses around the country, and request an audition. And lucky enough for us, I have been loathe to sell my 2003 Ford Focus, and it has been sitting in the driveway of my father's house in Rochester for three years, ever since I moved to New York City. More on the car in later posts, I am sure....I love it.

So we plotted out our route (as the first post explained), and next came the letter writing. We spent a month researching the LORT and SPT theatres in the cities we were visiting. What kind of theatre do they do? What is in their mission statement? What plays and musicals are in their upcoming (and past) seasons? Which directors did they hire? I swear, I do not know what people did before the Internet. All the information we wanted was at our fingertips (well, most of it). A couple of the places we researched had their own blogs, which were helpful to get a sense of the vibe there. We found out who specifically to contact, and then began the actual letter-writing.

I am still not done with my letters--one last city to go (Pittsburgh). We divided up the towns--I took upstate New York, Emily took Milwaukee and Chicago, I took Seattle, etc--and wrote individualized letters to each place. If nothing else, we learned a lot of information about what type of plays are being produced and what the national landscape is for people in our profession.

But it was Emily who pushed me to commit (to the auditon tour). Initially, I was nervous about this trip; I had finished grad school like most people do--broke. But I am glad I came around. Being a young actor in New York is a little...daunting. A lot of the opportunities for auditions in NYC come from open calls. These are great--I have had luck with those, and you have to keep going. But planning this trip has given me a long-range goal to work on all summer. I feel like I have been building my acting business, by gathering information, writing dozens of business letters, searching for audition material (not to mention working my ass off). It is a project I am building towards, as opposed to waiting for the next audition listing to appear. And you know, there are a LOT of great places to act around the country. We even came across more than a few experimental companies, something I was not expecting.

What next? Oh yeah...follow up. Phone calls.

The Beginning

Well, not exactly the beginning.
This is the blog of the Regional Theatre Audition Tour that wouldn't die. Two actors, fresh out of graduate school are campaigning for their careers through the country.
It all began with a dream and a map. And lots of informational books. We began in May with a huge roadmap from a chain bookstore and a bunch of stickie flags. We stickied every city in that map that had a LORT theatre in it and then we planned our route.
We have decided on a month long tour that highlights the cities of Syracuse, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Spring Green, WI, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Ashland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Denver and Pittsburgh. We had other cities in there but only recently decided that we were crazy and unless we had a time machine it would be impossible, IMPOSSIBLE to make every city we dreamed of.
But even stickies on a map were not enough to make this a successful tour.
The next step was writing letters. A million and one letters...