Adventures in amateur acting
- posted: 02 Oct. 2007
- scrollarts@byui.edu
It’s not every day that an Arts and Entertainment writer gets an undercover assignment, so when my editor suggested I audition for a campus production and write about my experience, I jumped at the chance.
I sat down to consider my options.
Maybe Wait Until Dark? No, the audition was coming up too soon. Plus, I would have to memorize a one-minute “monologue,” whatever that is. No, thanks.
Maybe As You Wish? Oh wait, it’s based on The Princess Bride, and I can’t stand that movie.
I watched The Taming of the Shrew on DVD to see if it was any better. If I had had a cyanide capsule handy I would have gladly taken it to stop the agony. I decided to try something else.
My salvation came in the form of a Comic Frenzy audition poster. I had been to the shows. All they do is make stuff up, right? Awesome! Good-bye, Shakespeare. Hello, Comic Frenzy.
Tryouts were intimidating. Pretty much anyone who has ever been in any campus play was there and already on the team.
Like some kind of boot camp drill sergeants they started breaking us down by telling us that the team was already well staffed and they didn’t need a single one of us. But if, through a series of rigorous “workshops,” one of us should prove ourselves worthy, we might be privileged to join their ranks.
Whoa. I was in over my head. Way over. Maybe I didn’t want to write this article after all.
So, for a few days they tried to teach us to sing crazy songs and invent crazy characters and create crazy scenes. By the end of it all, I found myself totally sapped of crazy.
So it came down to the last day and they told me, “Jacob, your humor is OK, but your characters are all the same. They’re all, like, you.”
They were right, of course. I can only do “smart-aleck white college boy.” They gave me a fair shot anyway, and for that I am grateful.
So if you ever think that theater/Comic Frenzy people are smarmy and condescending, you are right. But, as I discovered in my undercover work, they kind of have a right to be. Improv comedy is hard. 
