When you’re in the rehearsal, the director is like a reigning monarch. You always defer to his decisions. If you get a good director, they’ll listen to your ideas and incorporate them into his vision of the show. This is true if you’re an actor, designer, or even sometimes a producer. The director reigns.
But, as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. A director is in a position to employ actors. These days, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there that are actually available for actors. This is becoming more and more true as more and more theatres are using non-equity actors to fill out their casts and only giving Equity Guest Artist contracts for leads.
With so few jobs, actors are up earlier, working harder, and putting themselves out there more for the fewer jobs available. They put themselves into the hands of the auditioners and leave the rest up to their talent, and sometimes luck.
Sometimes, however, directors, producers, and other creatives can violate the etiquette of the power balance. This happened only a few days ago. A director in an audition room rifled through all of the resumes and headshots that they were given that day and took down all of the emails of the acting hopefuls that they saw that day. As this was a large call, there were over 800 emails. Later, an email was sent out that was entitled “Observations from the _________ Auditions.”
Many actors thought this was an invitation for a callback or (hold your breath) a job offer. Instead, it was an email hocking the acting class of the director for one of the shows from the season.
Not only is the preying on the hopes, fears, and dreams of people who got up at the crack of dawn to stand in line in the cold to wait to sing and act for you, but it’s just plain rude. It violates the delicate power balance between actor and director.
For those who are actually going to be cast in that particular show, how can you trust someone who took your information and used his position of power for his own gain? How can you work for or even respect someone who did that?
This director was reported to the union and subsequently sent out an apology email. Hopefully, this is the end of the story and everyone, even those not involved, learned something from this outrageous behavior.
Like how you should never do it.
