Festival Adventure, Day Two

(A long one about performing at my scholarship audition, getting lost in the snow, and seeing Avery Brooks!)

sunrise, snow, Towson, 

We were up with the sunrise, rushed to have four actors share a bathroom, skip breakfast, and get to our auditions.  Again, I had something to be thankful for: our audition was a few floors down from our bedroom!  The Sheraton North in Towson hosted many events for the festival and the shows and workshops were held at the Towson U campus.

A "holding room" (slightly creepy term in my opinion) was provided for us to warm up and run lines.  A room full of 20+ actors working through various methods of preparing themselves is an interesting place, let me tell you. :-)  I tried to be as much in the moment as possible, allow my body and mind to warm-up, ignore nerves, and focus on connecting with Anderson.  Finally our time came!  After waiting in a line, we were ushered into a hotel conference room with a small table and two rickety chairs on the "stage" area, a table at which sat four (or maybe three, I tried not to look at them too hard) judges, and a small audience behind them.  Boyfriend, Lauren, and Jonathan came to watch us, which helped me mentally a lot.  I smiled and introduced myself and Anderson with what he later called "a polite confidence" and then dove in.  We did a scene as Andrew and Dierdre in "I Hate Hamlet", which was my first-ever show.  I had fun, I felt good, and when I was done I wouldn't have changed anything about our performance, except for two things: what I wore, and that I almost fell off of aforementioned rickety chair when I had to stand on it.  Anderson caught me though, and we used the moment. :-)

All the actors got a public feedback time from respondents who were not judges.  Our respondents said that my energy and personality had been perfect from the scene, but that picking a scene from a production I had been in worked against me because I couldn't break away from the show in my head and make the scene stand alone.  Still, I was happy, and remained hopefully about possibly being a semi-finalist.

After that we were tired and hungry, but I wanted to make the most of the short time I had at the festival.  After grabbing lunch in the nearby Towson Town Center, I parted ways with Anderson and my other roommates and got on a shuttle for the school campus.  When I got off the shuttle, I realized I had left my festival program on the seat next to me and had no map and no schedule.  Plus, no one from my own school that I had texted had answered me.  PLUS, there was an inch or two of snow in the ground, very few cleared sidewalks, and I had forgotten to change from my flats into my boots.  I was freezing, but asked a nearby fellow shuttle rider if he knew where the Center for the Fine Arts was, and could I follow him.  He was nice, and from Albright College (little did I know Albright would be popping into my festival adventure later).  I followed them for a bit, but their group split up, and he was going opposite of where I thought I wanted to go, and I found myself lost and even colder.  I gave into helplessness and called Boyfriend (who was at work and couldn't really help me, I just wanted a familiar voice) and said "I'm lost. It's freezing.  I hate everyone."  He convinced me to go inside a building, any building, as soon and possible...and lo and behold that building was the hall I was trying to get to!

I was trying to make my way to Avery Brooks’ keynote address, which was NOT in the CFA but in Stephens Hall (the gorgeous stone building on the Towson campus that faces York Rd) and that was the building I accidentally walked into.  Cold and flustered, I told the first staff person I could find that I was “with the theatre festival” and looking for the Avery Brooks address.  I boarded an elevator, got an admission ticket, was reunited with my CCBC friends, and finally sat down and relaxed.

he was a few feet away from me!

To answer Niki’s question, yes, Mr. Brooks’ voice was awesome!  The Towson provost who introduced him said that you get so lost in the sound of Mr. Brooks’ voice that you forget to listen to what he’s saying.  It was true!  The address was actually a Q & A session…Mr. Brooks said he would rather “have a conversation” with us than “talk at us.”  He and some colleagues that were in the audience shared some anecdotes about theatre, his life, and words of wisdom, and the rest of the time was college-age audience members asking questions and receiving his answers.  He was gracious, thoughtful, and mesmerizing.  To be honest, listening to him almost put me in a trance-like state, but I was smart enough to type snippets of his conversation into my Blackberry, which I later transcribed into the little notebook I carry in my purse.

After that, I made my way to the shuttle to go back to the hotel, hoping to catch some of the CCBC auditions.  I ended up watching two sessions of scenes with Boyfriend, including Lauren and Jonathan’s.  We saw so many scenes that we genuinely enjoyed, two of which I know later made it to semi-finals.  Early evening saw us totally exhausted and tired of theatre for the day, so we claimed the rest of the day as our own with dinner out and a walk around the mall.  I publicly apologize to him for how overly tired I was and as a result, extremely hyper.  I'm sure it was either extremely entertaining or annoying.  I made it back to my own bed that night, happy with my day and anxious to hear the semi-finalists announcements the next day!