Your Humble Blogger is planning to audition tonight—in person!—for a production—in person!—of Waiting for Godot. I’m auditioning for Pozzo, who, if you don’t know the play, is a supporting part with a few medium-sized speeches, some slapstick, and a lot of shouting. Up my street, really.
Anyway, here I am preparing for my first audition in a year and a bit, and I’m doing the thing that I do where I try to guess which bits of the script they will have us read. This is a frequently fruitless endeavor—the director and producer will have something in mind and will suit themselves. Still, I try to be ready to read the bits that I think might make the biggest impact, and try not to be too unready to read the most difficult bits.
Here’s the thing about Pozzo, though: he spends about ten minutes of the second act of the play lying on the ground crying for help getting up. And if I were the director? I would totally have my putative Pozzos try to play a page out of that bit. I mean, I would think there would be half-a-dozen or more putative Pozzos who could do a decent job on the complicated dialogue in the first act. And you can’t really cold-read slapstick. But if you ask everyone who wants to play the part to collapse on the floor and moan “Help! Help!” while you have two people read the Didi and Gogo dialogue, I think you might learn a lot about which actors you want to work with.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.