"In his teaching and his directing, Richard Seyd tries to put actors in touch with their infinite possibilities."

"In 1990, I performed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At Berkeley Repertory Theatre under a brilliant English director named Richard Seyd. Last year, I saw his extraordinary production of A Streetcar Named Desire at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, which was breaktaking in its sensuality, theatricality and humanity - the kind of experience that makes an audience understand the magic only theatre can summon.

Since then, Seyd has relocated to Los Angeles, and directed the recent production of Noel Coward's Present Laughter at the Pasadena Playhouse. His most recent production, The Lion in the Winter, starring Mariette Hartley and Tony Amendola at LaMirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, opens this weekend.

I interviewed Seyd in his charming home, which has all the signs of an artist in residence. We sat in his study and chatted about theatre, acting, and the classes he's begun teaching in Los Angeles.

BSW/D-L: As a youngster, did you start out wanting to act?

Richard Seyd: No. My theatre experience actually comes from my mother. From the age of six until I was 11, I lived in a village of about 400 people in the North of England. My mother started a theatre company there. She did pantomimes and plays that she wrote on various village issues. It was incredibly popular. People would come from neighboring villages all around.

It took until I was about 17 or 18 to realize that these shows had a very profound effect on me. I started doing theatre in high school and, like everyone else in 1968, I became very politicized. I went to drama school and then, along with some friends, we formed a political theatre company called Red Ladder Theatre. We performed all over England. I was acting, managing, producing, directing, we all did everything. I was with the company for eight years before I was offered the opportunity to teach in San Francisco, and from the moment I got here, I actually felt much more at home than I ever did in England. There's this sort of expansiveness that the space and culture of America gives people. I felt I could breathe in a new way.

I fell in love with San Francisco as a place to live and was based there for 18 years. I have always run my career, if that's what ones calls it, around where I live rather than around where I work. I've never wanted to be a sort of roving, traveling director who's always on the road. That's just not of interest to me. It doesn't suit my sensibility. Plus, to me, theatre is about community, and therefore living where I'm working means something to me. BSW/D-L: When did you start directing?

Seyd: Right after my teaching commitment was over, which was a year and a half after I arrived in San Francisco. I got involved with several Bay Area theatre companies and eventually ended up as the associate artistic director at A.C.T. I was there until I moved down here two years ago. Of course, I taught through that whole period - at ACT, Stanford, Davis - but my primary teaching was, and still is, working situations with professional actors. That's what I enjoy doing more than anything else. It's an ongoing lab for professional actors who want to have a place to work and stretch themselves and expand their own range. I still commute once a week to teach in San Francisco.

BSW/D-L: Do you teach here at all?

Seyd: I've just started to teach here out of the Los Angeles Theater Center, LATC. The more I've been down here, the more it's become to clear to me that it's really important for actors to have a safe environment in which they can do profound work, because the work in this town is so scattershot unless you're at the top of the profession. In the middle and lower reaches of the profession, those people that are guest-starring or doing pilots that aren't being picked up or small roles in film, it's really important to have an environment in which you are being stretched, because in the this town, you are being stretched, because in this town, you are playing into your type so much that you can be reduced to your type inside yourself unless you're very careful. If you continually work only within the range of what you already do well, you r ability to do more than that begins to atrophy. You're not exercising those muscles, and it's crucial that you have a safe place where you can so that.

BSW/D-L: How do you define that safety?

Seyd: I'm convinced that if you, the actor, are going into an arena that is unfamiliar or not comfortable, if you're exploring a part of your range that is not easily accessible, it's scary because there are reasons why it's not accessible. You have, for some reason, suppressed it and you need to feel safe to risk bringing it out. In a sense, the ideal actor is somebody who can play anybody who's ever existed on the planet. That actor doesn't exist, but if you think about it, the ideal actor has that infinite range and an understanding of every aspect of humanity that's ever existed inside themselves. The journey of the actor should be to develop as much of that as they can.

That's the growth journey - that's the sanity of the profession. It's the market place that creates neuroses, not the craft. Acting is one of the sanest crafts there is. What makes people insane is the competition, the lack of power, the sense of not being in control of your life, the constant rejection. Of course, the truth is that nobody has any power. The producer is at the mercy of the network, which has to listen to the advertisers. Power is an illusion. The act of understanding and accepting that you have no power is actually a very profound thing.

That, in the end, will be sanity-making, because you can create a situation for yourself where you go into an audition, get rejected, allow the hurt to be there, feel the rejection, let it pass through you, and then you go on. What tends to happen instead is that the actor fights and resists the rejection. Rejection hurts. And what happens is that you start to feel smaller and smaller or you stop altogether or you become more and more afraid and tight, and so you end up doing worse and worse. It becomes a Cath-22: An actor needs an open heart, but everything in the environment in which you work makes it more and more difficult to have that open heart.

That's why you need a workshop environment that is safe, where you don't have to think about those things, where you don't have to be afraid. Actors already live in enough state of fear. They don't need to be in a classroom where they're also afraid. That doesn't provide an environment in which you can go places that you haven't been before. Only safety truly gives you the ability to perform with risk. That's the only environment in which that growth can truly happen, by your own volition. It can be ripped from you, it can be pulled out of you, but my feeling is that it never really stays with you when that's how it happens. If you're in an environment in which you're being encouraged to discover growth for yourself and you are being supported in the act of that discovery, then when you find it, it stays.

So the work that I do in my classes is stretch work which enables professional actors to work on types they don't get cast as. As they begin to find that part of themselves and find areas in themselves that they didn't know existed or had suppressed, what's fascinating is that they'll start getting cast that way because they carry those changes with them. They start to bring them into the room with them when they go to an audition.

The other aspect of the work that I focus on is about the whole question of being in the moment and what that's all about. The problem with being in the moment is that as soon as you're told that you should be in the moment, you are aware that you should be, and the moment you are aware that you should be, you're not. It becomes self-conscious. Acting teachers then invent exercises to get the actor to be in the moment and forget the awareness.

For me, the thing that stops actors from being in the moment is anticipation of the next moment. One of the things that actors refuse to acknowledge is how much ahead of themselves they are. They fall into the trap of waiting for the next moment, their cue. In my experience, the only way to be in the moment is to risk the next line not being there - risk falling off the cliff every single moment. Otherwise you're reeling a safety net out in front of you, which is what anticipation actually is doing. If you're standing in the wings or you're thinking about what you're about to say or do, you're already out of the moment. You're already one beat ahead of yourself.

In my approach, I get actors to move through the text thought by thought. Rather than learning lines, the actor focuses on why they say or do what they say or do. This detailed process allows the actor to absorb the material without having to mechanically memorize their lines. The end result allows the actor to be confident in risking the next moment to not be there, which enables them to be effortlessly "in the moment."

For the same reason, when I'm in rehearsals, I never do a first reading. For me, the first read-throughs create an artificial sense of a final result. I'm much more interested in beginning by moving moment to moment with no expectations - just discovery. In using this technique, you're working on why you say what you say.

BSW/D-L: You mean why the character says what he or she says.

Seyd: I don't see a distinction. When you are given a role, you are that character. What is character? Character is the history of the person who is playing the role, meeting the imagination of the writer. It is out of the meeting of those two things that the character arises. So it's not just your responses, because the person who wrote the material thought of somebody specific when they were writing. The imaginative human being that the writer has created is not you, so there isn't anything else you use but you and your own imagination to get to this character.

To think about you and the character as two separate things is a mistake in my book. You're always using the combination of yourself and your attempt to understand who that person is. It's what screws up a lot of actors. This release in to character works in both mediums, film or stage. In film, it's not that the character is reduced to yourself, but you need to make certain that 100 percent of the portrayal is honest because the camera reads you in a way a stage doesn't.

BSW/D-L: So do you thing that there's a difference between film and stage acting?

Seyd: I don't believe that the inner work in theatre is any different from the inner work in film. There are differences in the media in the sense that you have to learn how to not be aware of the camera when you start working in film, just as in theatre you mustn't try to wither ignore or over-accept the presence of the audience. And there are certain differences in the theatre in that you do have to project you presence more, whereas in film you have to allow the medium to search out your presence. So there is a shift in energy, but that's not hard for actors to do.

It's always been so strange to me that this is an issue here, because I don't see directors having that problem with the English actors. English actors move between the mediums constantly.

BSW/D-L: Why is it so much easier to do that there?

Seyd: There are two reasons. One is that there's only one actors' union in England, so that makes going from one medium to another easier. Plus, in England, all production takes place in one central city. In America, the center for film is in LA, and theatre is centered in New York. If everything were in Des Moines, the movement would happen much more.

BSW/D-L: It's amazing to me that, with your British background, you can direct something like A Streetcar Named Desire with such a profound understanding of American culture.

Seyd: When I came here, I developed a great affection for the American personality. I have some problems with the Puritanical streak in this culture, but I love the innovative and revolutionary streak. People are always willing to try something. England is more conservative. And then there are the class issues. Coming from the culture I do, I think I have a deeper understanding of class that a lot of Americans. I come from a culture in which class is very dominant. However, class exists in this culture and writers write class into their work. They don't always know that they're doing it, but I think that that is an element of the American play, whether is be Streetcar, A View From the Bridge, or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Coming from England, I naturally see the class issues in a play, whereas some American directors perhaps wouldn't.

I have a sort of split perspective, having spent half of my life in one culture and the other half in another. But the thing that I identify strongest with in Streetcar, and something I have learned throughout my life, is to lead more with my own heart and to trust my instincts about people. I think Williams had a profound understanding of the emotional courage that it takes to be a human being in this world. I feel I have grown to understand that, too. And I have a desire to communicate to an audience that they should respect the emotional courage that it takes for then to exist in this world."

"Richard Seyd explains how being in the moment must be built into the rehearsal process."

"One of the best-kept secrets of acting is … all actors lie to themselves and to others about how little they are truly in the moment." So says Los Angeles-based, longtime director and teacher Richard Seyd.

In a letter to the four actors he'd just cast in the current Berkeley Repertory Theatre production of Donald Marguiles' Dinner with Friends, Seyd elaborated: "Although everyone pays lip service to the phrase, no one ever gives actors the tools to allow them not to anticipate, not to have other thoughts floating around, not to have a critical voice - all the things that keep you from being present in each moment."

So, over time, Seyd devised a rehearsal method guaranteed to keep actors in the present. The goal is for actors - in this case, Lauren Lane, Lorri Holy, Dan Hiatt, and Bill Geisslinger - to learn the material while they are actually doing it. The result is a spontaneous, deeply felt performance in which the actors never anticipate; that is, they never in their minds jump ahead to the next lines or actions.

"The whole thing in American acting is to be in the moment," Seyd explained in a phone conversation. "But when you're aware of that, it takes you out of the moment" - a veritable Catch -22. "So you do exercises to get you back to that place: relaxation, concentration. It's easier to be in the moment on camera because you're not in front of a live audience. And if it doesn't work, you can shoot it again. But you don't get that luxury onstage." That anxiety is what causes actors to anticipate.

For starters, Seyd eliminated first read-throughs. "If you read through the whole play, your tendency is to start acting before you're ready," he explained. He also cautions his actors not to memorize any lines in advance - or, in fact, at all - nor to look for intentions, or objectives. All that will evolve organically in due course.

Seyd believes that everything you do and say onstage is triggered by a specific impulse. So, before that first rehearsal, actors go through the text, breaking down their lines into clumps of individually expressed thoughts (usually structured by the author's punctuation). They then choose a "trigger" or impulse for each separate thought. Triggers are what motivate each moment and cause the actor to speak / respond. "It has nothing to do with learning cues, in the sense of the last words before you respond," Seyd wrote in his letter to the actors in which he detailed his rehearsal method. "It is learning the content of what is expressed, the meaning that causes your response."

Initially determined on the most surface level, the triggers will change as rehearsals progress. An example of the most garden-variety trigger: Something somebody else says or does causes you to respond in a particular way. Seyd lists eight other common triggers in this letter to the actors, including subtext. But he cautions against choosing subtextual material as a trigger in your prep work. "Actors tend to load themselves with unnecessary subtext," he said.

The Lookup Read

Once in rehearsal, Seyd and cast discuss the backstory and then proceed to the "lookup read".

With script in lap, already marked with thoughts that need to be expressed (rather than lines highlighted), each actor listens carefully to what the other actor is giving him or her, thinks about what his or her response might be, looks down at the page to see what the lines actually are, and then looks up and delivers them. "Normally, you do table work, them blocking, all carrying scripts, then about three weeks in to the rehearsal process you look and discover the other actor," explained Seyd. "That's when the real work starts. I put them into contact the very first day. So the process of getting off book becomes an evolution. You don't know what's coming until the other actor gives it to you. It feels internally spontaneous each time."

You go through every moment of the play sequentially, never anticipating, never actually learning the lines by rote (but deepening your understanding of the character and circumstances) as you go. Eventually, as rehearsals progress, what you think your lines might be evolve in to what the lines indeed are. You will be unable to run you your own lines independently, and you will lose that not-in-the-moment sensation of visualizing your lines on the page (an actor's plague that normally doesn't go away until weeks after opening).

Similarly, when actors have more than eight lines, or six separate thoughts in a row, they write each separate thought on a card.

"No monologue is a monologue," explained Seyd. "We're having a dialogue right now, but I'm doing most of the talking and you're going Uh-huh. As a scene in a play, it would be a 10-page monologue. Actors confronted with that would think they have a tremendous amount of work, and the audience would perceive it as a monologue approaching because that's how the actor is experiencing it. But when you see it as thoughts on cards, the actual process itself becomes a movement through time. This way, the actors never see the printed page [in their mind's eye]. If it just gives actors that, it's worth it.

Actors' Response

Does the method work? When cast member Lorri holt, who plays the discombobulated would-be Beth, got Seyd's letter, she was initially offended. "Here I am in my late 40s, and I've worked so hard to cobble together my own approach that hopefully results most of the time in truthfulness," she told me a few days after opening, "and someone's trying to tell me how to act!" She also couldn't understand how deconstructing the text into discrete thoughts and finding what motivates each thought could possibly get her out of her head and into the moment.

But, said Holt, "It was incredibly liberating." She felt like she was flying. "The task becomes completely listening to other actors and not anticipating," she explained. "When you forget something, you're thinking, Why doesn't that come to me? And there's usually a reason. It was tremendously exciting and revealing." And, yes, she no longer visualized her lines on the page.

Dan Hiatt, who plays Gabe, said that when he got Seyd's letter, he was enthusiastic. "I've found lately in rehearsal I was getting so conscious of people in the rehearsal room, people watching, it was hard to be spontaneous," he told me. "With this technique, your focus is so much on other things, that [self-consciousness] disappears. You start slowly and talk about every single line to find those triggers. Ordinarily I would have been so much more conscious of where the laughs are going to come, and how to build them in." Instead, he found himself surprised when the audience laughed.

Like Holt, Hiatt is a longtime professional actor who'd developed a whole way of working. Ordinarily he would make a tape with his cues on it and play the tape until the lines were solid, using that as a base upon which to put everything else. "I've always wondered if this is really a good idea, " he admitted. "I think you do get kind of surfacey that way."

He also used to run his lines while driving to the theater and said he couldn't do that now. "You have the first moment, and after that, you just trust that the trigger will happen." The lookup read, he said, is a completely inside-out way of learning the text.

Is he really able not to anticipate with this method? "Yes. In the best circumstances, you're really listening for that trigger, and until it comes you don't know what you're going to say."

The Upshot

Radical as this rehearsal approach may sound, I think it's a natural and logical extension of the classroom work most of us have done. Seyd swears that it's all feasible within today's stunted rehearsal periods. Nor do these techniques cancel out most of the basic, normal homework, which Seyd lists in his letter: "activating your imagination, day dreaming, thinking, and going over the scenes in order to understand them at a deeper level."

Final question: Can an actor use these techniques elsewhere? Seyd thinks the ideal is for a full ensemble to be working this way but said it's also a wonderful rehearsal technique for individual actors, both stage and film. His wife, stage and film actress, Maura Vincent, has been using the approach for three years, as have other actors. "Even tough it's easier in film to go moment by moment, "he pointed out, "the actors still do anticipate - it's endemic to the profession."

Hiatt, for his part, plans to carry over some of what he's learned, particularly the new way of working on monologues. He added, "It helps to have had experience. I don't think in my early years I would have understood what Seyd was after. And to give yourself over to this as an older actor can be hard. But a lot of work is still the same - it's a technique for getting the play on its feet in an organic way."

The proof is in the pudding: In Dinner With Friends, everyone appeared to be listening deeply and responding spontaneously. The cast, said Holt, is sad that the rehearsal process is over."

As the TBA Generals approach and audition season picks up, here are a few thoughts on selecting and preparing an audition monolog.

Selecting
Choosing a good piece is the first and most important part of the audition process. The material you select tells auditors a lot about you as an artist, your tastes, and how you see yourself. To find new pieces, see and read as many new plays as you can, identify authors who tend to write for your taste and range, and ask everyone you know to keep an eye out for pieces for you and do the same for them. Pick pieces that you have a strong connection to. Even if it is the silliest piece imaginable, it should tickle you in some way and express a side of yourself that has some meaning for you. Ten different auditors will like ten different pieces, so forget about trying to please everyone and choose pieces you love.

Choose material that is in your range. Save stretch work for class or (if you're lucky) for rehearsal. Remember, an audition is a mini-performance. Try to assess your own strengths and weaknesses as honestly as you can, and get feedback from others on your selections. Start a weekly or monthly monolog/cold reading group with your friends where you can try out new pieces for each other and practice your cold-reading technique. It helps if the members are different types, ages and ranges to lessen the feeling of competition in the group for material. Never use a piece a friend introduces you to without asking their permission, and avoid the monologs from collection books, as they tend to be overused. Finding new audition pieces is a never-ending part of most actors' lives, so it's helpful if you can learn to enjoy the process.

Preparing
Over the past five years, teacher and director Richard Seyd has developed the Trigger Approach, a system designed to help actors stay more 'in the moment' while performing. Here is a simplified version of that system as it relates to preparing an audition monolog.

It is helpful to divide monologs into two types - story pieces, and pieces that contain a spontaneous series of thoughts (of course some pieces will have elements of both). With a spontaneous series of thoughts, the first thing you do is to break down each thing you say into individual expressed thoughts (these often coincide with punctuation, but this can vary). Break the text down into the smallest thoughts you can without losing the sense of the line. For example "Fine I guess" could be broken down into 2 separate thoughts (Fine / I guess), but as 3 thoughts (Fine / I / guess) begins to lose its meaning. Once you have broken the text down into separate thoughts, put each thought on a separate index card. The reason for this is because when you see a monolog on a page, and learn it from the page, you are seeing the totality of the piece and where each thought lies on the page. You then have to work to imaginatively turn that into a movement through time, which is what any monolog actually is. If you put each thought on a separate card, and not look at it on the page again, then you are working on the piece from the beginning as a movement through time, and not a chunk of text.

The next step is to do the "trigger" work. Begin by using the stack of cards as your script, going thru them one at a time (numbering them on the back is helpful in case they get out of order). Go slowly at first, not worrying about pace. Start by saying the first thought to whomever you imagine you are speaking to, and then before you look at the next thought, think what it might be. Then look at the next card and see what the writer actually has you express. If what you thought it might be was different from the actual line, ask yourself two things:

1. What is in the immediately preceding moment that triggers the next expressed thought?
2. What is the difference (even if it is only a slight paraphrase) between what I thought it might be and what the writer actually has me say?

After answering these questions, even if only tentatively, go back to the beginning and continue working your way through the entire piece this way. At no time should you be saying the lines out loud directly off the cards, but only speaking when you are looking away from the cards at the person you speaking to. As you are speaking each thought, imagine before you speak how you want to affect the person(s) you are talking with.

The idea behind this process is to help you to understand what specifically you are responding to as you go from moment to moment. It is not "memorizing" in the traditional sense of the word, but learning the specific content that leads to the next thought. You are creating for yourself a deeper understanding of the thoughts, which will in turn create for you the freedom, in performance, to not think ahead and be more fully in the moment as you learn to trust that your next thought will come. Rather than experiencing it as a prepared speech, it will feel that it is coming from inside you, one thought at a time, and you will no longer see the words on the page as you perform. Many actors also find that they lose their self-consciousness working this way, and feel much less nervous.

You will also find that you can risk a fuller expression of each moment without worrying that you will forget the words. Anticipation is often a reaction to a fear by actors that they will forget the words, and if you have memorized by rote (that is to say, without and understanding of why you say what you say), going very deeply into each moment may very well leave you lost for words, since you have no connection from one thought to the next. If, however, your understanding of the text is built on each moment leading to the next, then the more deeply you go into each moment, the more likely it is that the next thought will appear for you effortlessly.

With story pieces, you can do much of the same Trigger work, breaking the text down into thoughts, putting each on separate cards, working out how one thought leads to the next, and using the cards as you learn the piece. However, the source for many of your thoughts will not only be the immediately preceding thought, but also images from the event itself, as you replay it in your mind. Therefore it is important to create the event for yourself in great detail, even greater than that given in the script. That way, as you tell the story, you will be choosing details to tell, and leaving others out (as we do in life), and still maintaining a strong inner experience of the event in all its fullness. Even though you have the totality of the experience inside of you as you tell it (in other words, you know how it ends), how the story is told will still be spontaneous, arising out of the memory of the event itself and the interaction with the other the story is being expressed to.

A few other questions can be helpful to ask yourself when preparing a story piece. First, how long ago did this story occur? If you are telling about an event that happened yesterday it will have a different tone than if you are telling about an event that occurred 20 years ago. Also, ask yourself how many times the character has told this story before. If you are revealing a story of a difficult trauma from your past, it will feel very different to tell if it is the first time you've ever spoken it to anyone, as opposed to one that you've worked through and told a hundred times. If you do choose that you've told it many times, ask yourself what kinds of reactions this character might have gotten when he/she told it in the past, and what expectations they might have as they tell it now. Finally, ask the very important question of who you are speaking to. If you are not clear and specific with this choice, you will tend to drift back to watching yourself as you perform, rather than focussing on something or someone outside of yourself. Also, if you are not clear on the circumstances of the play, you will tend to play emotions rather than situation, which will take both you and the auditors out of the piece.

One way to help create a very specific other is to imagine reactions that the person you are addressing is having as you speak to them. (You can do this with any audition monolog, not just story pieces.) For example, you might imagine that they turn away, or say something inflammatory just as you reach a certain part of your story. Simply address the piece to a spot on the wall, an object, or out in space. Decide what the space or spot is doing rather then trying to imagine an actual person as this can take away energy from what you are trying to do. It is generally better to address your piece somewhere over the heads of the auditors or between two people, as most auditors get uncomfortable if you do your piece directly to them. Also, don't do your piece to an actual onstage chair - it is too concrete an object and tends to limit the auditors' imagination of who you might be talking to and how that person is reacting.

Many times, clues to answering questions about who you are talking to, or your relationship to the story you are telling can be found in the play or script, but if they are not, you can create a powerful backstory for yourself. Always make the strongest and highest stakes choice you feel the piece can hold, one that stirs your imagination, and is fun for you to play. When performing an audition piece out of context of the play, you can change the given circumstances to your liking, but good writers will usually give you plenty to work with if you read the whole play carefully. Also, radically changing the context of a piece from a well-known play (ex.: anything by Shakespeare) may be very jarring to people that know the play well.

A few last thoughts: Keep your pieces short. At the TBA Generals, if you do two pieces, each should not be more than 45 seconds long (if you have 2 minutes total), or you will be nervous about going over. Start with the piece that you are most comfortable with, and introduce your piece(s) loud and clear. The introduction is just as important as the piece itself, so practice them together. Break a leg!

Unless you have a particularly famous parent in the business, the single most important thing for you to learn to do well is auditioning. While there is a great deal of overlap with performing, auditioning is very different and has its' own set of skills to learn and pitfalls to avoid. This article will focus on prepared and cold readings, where you are asked to read from a script for an audition. The term 'cold read' refers to those instances where you are asked to read a scene with little or no time to read the whole play or get off-book.

The first pitfall for many actors when they are auditioning is that they try to feel the same way they do when they are performing. Auditioning is an artificial form, and when actors don't feel the same way in auditions as they do in performance they often internalize it and think it is their fault and blame themselves for not 'acting.' So the first thing to turn around is to take the pressure off of yourself and accept that you do not have to feel like you feel when you're performing.

So, given that auditioning is an artificial form and feels different from performing, how do you create the sense of a performance at an audition, or a feeling for what you will do if they actually cast you? The main thing is to control the time. Controlling the time does not mean sitting down, smoking a cigarette and talking about the weather (this is called wasting the time). But most actors, inside of auditions, take on the energy of readers. For many reasons (nerves, fear, discomfort with being in a no-power situation), actors tend to read as fast as they can, burying their heads in the script and losing connection with their scene partner, even when they have the next line memorized.

But directors are not simply looking for people who can read well; they are looking for people who can bring the script to life by creating moments where audiences see discovery, reaction and interaction. This includes moments of silence or pausing to let moments land, or where you register a reaction. Silence and pausing are huge in auditions because actors are afraid to use them. The impact of an actor who has the confidence to take a pause and land the next line is enormous. If you rush through the text reading as fast as you can, you turn into a reader and lose the ability to create moments. Remember that casting people understand that you are doing a prepared reading, and while they may hope for a fully realized performance, what will make them cast you (or at least call you back for a further reading) is simply a moment or two where you show a particular color and they see where you are capable of going with the role with a full rehearsal period.

You should look for four moments in the first page and a half (they need to be in the first page and a half because you may not get further than that) where you are definitely going to control the time before you speak the next line. You then learn that next line so you don't have to look at the book when you deliver it, make a strong choice about how you are going affect the other person with what you say, and then in the audition make sure you do it. It is useful to make the first moment you choose within the first two lines so it can help ground you. It is a very different feeling when you give yourself the tools to start creating moments in an audition rather than reading. You will find controlling the time will relax you profoundly, far more than any relaxation exercises you might do before the audition.

An example of controlling the time might be a moment where something important is revealed to you in the scene. In reaction, you look the other person in the eye, turn to leave, and then decide to come back towards them, delivering the next line very close to them in a low voice. Or you can use a chair to accent a powerful moment of discovery by pausing, standing very still and then slowly sitting down at the moment your partner reveals the crucial information to you. Again, you should be off-book on the lines for these moments and not have to look at the script, or it will distract from the effect. Always choose moments that have weight in them. The most effective places tend to be those where important information is revealed, a major turning point is reached, or a decision is made.

Another way to describe 'controlling the time' is to think in terms of film. When you are looking at the script before the audition, imagine where would there be a close-up of your character in the edited version, and what your characters' reaction would be in that close-up. Then you play that moment before you say the next line. Thinking in film terms helps you find the moments that have weight in them.

Getting Off-Book and Cold Readings
You do not need to be completely or even mostly off-book to do a good reading, and many times that is impossible as you may only have a few moments to look at the script. In this case, quickly scan thru the first half-page of the script, and then the last half page. This will tell you where the scene or character ends up, so you can play how they change (their 'arc') from the beginning of the scene to the end. Then quickly scan the stage directions and look for essential physical actions like slaps, kisses, entrances and exits. Finally, choose three or four places to control the time, (at least two in the first half-page), and quickly memorize the lines you speak immediately after these moments. With practice, this process can be done very quickly, and if you still have time you can then read the scene from beginning to end. Resist the temptation to read aloud with someone else who is at the audition until you have done this crucial preparation, or to socialize with friends who are at the audition.

Here are a few other techniques that can help you come in more prepared, connect with your scene partner, and let the auditors focus on you and your interaction with the other actors.

Hold the script very still when you are auditioning. It is distracting when actors rustle or wave the script around. Also, it breaks your hand-eye coordination, making it harder to find where you left off when you return your eyes to the page. If you keep the script still, it will disappear for the auditors and they will focus more on you and what is happening in the scene. Use your thumb to keep your place on the page. Highlighting your lines also helps. Some people like to enlarge the script with a photocopier so they don't have to squint or wear glasses. You should always keep the script in hand during a cold reading, even if you are completely off-book, or the auditors may feel that you are no longer doing a prepared reading and will expect a finished performance. Actors working without a script in hand also make everyone in the room worry that you will forget your lines, creating a very uncomfortable and distracting situation for all.

Never speak when you are looking at the page. Instead, look down, pick up (or 'steal') the line from the page, look at your scene partner and then say the line to them. Also, don't keep your eyes on the script when your partner is speaking. Rather than looking down to steal your line while they are speaking to you, stay with your partner with your eyes, letting what they say land on you. When they are finished, then look down for your line. This is particularly important for filmed auditions, where your reactions to the other person are often more important than the words you speak. You can also keep your head movement to a minimum when stealing lines if you practice moving only your eyes when looking down. Stealing the lines and keeping eye contact while speaking may slow down your cold readings at first, but if you practice this regularly you will get very fast at this, and eventually able to steal several lines at a time. Reading aloud to children is good practice for building up this skill - experiment with how much you can keep eye contact while reading a story to them. As with anything, these skills will become natural with practice. Particularly for auditioning, where nerves often come up, these techniques need to become habits that are in your body, so that you don't have to think about them during auditions.

If at all possible, get the play ahead of time and read it in its entirety. Call the theatre, casting director or your agent and find out what specific scenes you will be reading from. Offer to come to the theatre and pick up the play or scenes (agents will usually fax or e-mail this to you), or at least borrow them long enough to copy and bring right back. You may feel that you are being a nuisance by calling to get this information from busy casting people, but remember that they are very highly motivated to see you do your best work and solve their casting problems. It is in everybody's best interests to have you come in as prepared as possible and show what you are capable of doing.