So Jane left her current book lying open this morning, and I glanced at it. It was some kind of historical romance, I don’t know who by, and one particularly line struck me with ghastly force:

Her nape experienced primitive sensations.

Jane tells me that the character whose nape this was had just been kidnapped, and I suppose some primitive sensations are not inappropriate in such circumstances. I imagine it might also encourage one to move one’s limbs through a variety of primitive evolutions, and perhaps to motivate one’s lungs through a series of primitive ululations.

It might even make your hackles rise.

My sons are both in drama class, and the elder of the two recently auditioned for the high school’s production of Sweeney Todd (he was not chosen). Jane happened to notice a book on doing auditions that was one of Amazon’s monthly $3.99 or less books: Audition, by Michael Shurtleff. Written in 1978, the book is subtitled “Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part”; and Shurtleff certainly seems to be the guy who knows. I had never heard of him before, but during the 1960’s and 1970’s, he was an important and influential casting director in New York. He discovered young actors like Barbra Streisand, Gene Hackman, and Bette Midler; he cast the unknown Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate; he worked with David Merrick and with Bob Fosse. This is a guy who saw eight or nine plays a week, every week, and sat through thousands of auditions.

So Jane suggested we get a copy for my son to read; and since we had it, I read it too. (I say “too”, but I don’t think my son has even looked at it.) And I have to say, it’s fascinating.

The theater is one of those things we all think we know about. We make jokes about actors—oh, he’s an actor? What restaurant is he appearing at? We’ve seen oodles of actors on the big and little screens. We’ve seen movies about stage shows. We read about them in the newspaper and on weblogs. We thing we get it. And deep inside, I think most of us say to ourselves, “You know, it can’t be that hard, what they do. I could do that.” Turns out, there’s a lot more to it than you might think. And one of those things is that what you need to do to audition well is significantly different than what you need to do in a normal performance.

When go to audition—when you do what’s called a “reading”—you’re given a script, often for a part you’ve never seen before. If you ask politely, and if the auditors are so inclined, you might get ten minutes to look at it. You simply do not have time to work up a character, as you would in rehearsals for a play. On the other hand, you have to invest your performance with strong, significant emotion (and humor) or you won’t be noticed. You cannot work up a character; but you have to play a character with real needs and real emotions. And so, says Shurtleff, you have to play yourself. You have to wake up your own needs and emotions, and use them.

Here’s the first thing I hadn’t realized: acting is all about the emotion. The playwright provided the words; the actor has to deliver them convincingly and compellingly. And it doesn’t matter whether the actor understands the words; what matters is whether he gets the emotional content right. (I remember hearing that when Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins performed in Shadowlands, Winger read up on C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham; she did all kinds of research to make her performance more convincing. Anthony Hopkins didn’t do any of that; he simply came and did what he does. And of course, it worked.)

The other thing I hadn’t realized is that in an audition, none of the auditors cares whether you perform the role the way they will want it to on stage. They know you haven’t worked up the part; heck, they probably aren’t quite sure how they will want it done. What they are looking for is someone interesting. And the book is full of extremely pragmatic advice on how to be that person.

It also points out that if you aren’t selected (and usually you won’t be) you can’t assume that it’s because you auditioned badly. You might simply be the wrong size, or you might remind the director of his boyhood enemy. You don’t know, and generally you’ll never know, and it’s not worth worrying about. Simply do the best audition you can, and let it go.

So the book was fascinating at that level, as a window into a world of the theater. But it was also interesting on another level, that of culture and world views. To put it bluntly, my view of the world and how it works is extremely different from Shurtleff’s. At one point, while discussing soliloquies, he says

In anothe era people talked to God, lifted up their heads and talked directly at Him up there in heaven, just as we’ve seen Zero Mostel do as Tevya in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. In this era, where almost everyone is an atheist or an agnostic, we’ve given up talking to God (although occasionally in moments of greatest stress, we may still say, “God, help me!” and make bargains with Him if He will).

I learn from this that religion did not play a significant part in the New York theater world in the ’60’s and ’70’s, and perhaps also that what Shurtleff knew about religious people he knew from the stage rather than from real life.

Later, he talks about using your dreams and fantasies to drive your emotions in your auditions:

Do you see now, Laura, that we don’t live for the realities but for the fantasies, the dreams of what might be. If we lived for reality, we’d be dead, every last one of us. Only dreams keep us going.

And later, he says,

We have lots of truth all day long, ground into us endlessly, usually someone else’s truth, which they insist we know whether we want to or not. We have our own truths to face all the time, unattractive and unappealing, so that it takes every ounce of imagination to create some sort of dream to hold on to, however foolish, however unlikely, however hidden. People live for their dreams, not for the oppressiveness of truths.

This statement took my breath away. It’s as striking a description of the human condition absent the Christian hope as I’ve ever seen: truth is too hard, too difficult to live with, so find a comforting fantasy to give you something to live for. And yet, the Truth is out there, and He loves us. It’s simply too tragic for words.