The Audition

Josh already has a Disney show, but now he wants to be a movie star. Coach thinks he can get him there, but they’re going to have to rebuild his craft from the ground up. And it’s going well—at least, that’s what Josh thinks. After all, maybe the problem is with his acting, but maybe it’s just him. Drawing on the author’s experience as a former child star, The Audition explores the ins and outs of acting through a series of increasingly difficult exercises, auditions, and callbacks—turning the problem of “good acting” into a stunt to be executed onstage in real time, in order to answer the questions: Does the stuff we do in acting class really make a difference? Or is the difference between good and great actors mainly just luck? How good are people at knowing what’s going on inside other people? And what does it mean to convince a human audience that you, the actor, are also human?