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.