Anatomy of a Showcase

I’m currently less than a week away from one of the biggest opportunities of my career as a young actor. As a recent graduate from one of the top MFA programs in our country, I’m now preparing for our Actor’s Showcase taking place in Los Angeles and New York City. It’s an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get my work seen by hundreds of top talent agents, managers, and casting directors in the two largest markets in the country. Showcase well, and I could be on a network television show, or a feature film, or even Broadway, before the year is out. Or more realistically, and no less impressive, I could be making a living through acting.

For those who are unfamiliar, the showcase is a fairly simple concept. Each newly minted MFA performs at least two scenes, sometimes three, in front of an industry audience. Some schools choose the scenes for you, but ours lets you pick the material yourself. There are pros and cons to this system; the pros being you get a chance to comb through as many plays as you like until you find the right one, and the cons being—do you know how many plays there are? Me neither. A lot. And they aren’t all good—or even mediocre.

That phase—the search—was the hardest for me. I had the entire canon of western theatrical literature at my disposal, and I couldn’t seem to find anything that worked for me. And I’m a tall, handsome, young white male—there’s one of those in literally every play ever except like Topdog/Underdog. But when you’re in the trenches reading five plays a day, as I was at my peak, everything gets blurry. And I was not the most efficient showcase searcher. My problem was the artist and literary enthusiast in me had trouble dismissing plays even if it became clear they weren’t going to work, simply because I had to know how they turned out. The good news there being I read a lot of plays—over fifty in a matter of months—and am therefore much more knowledgeable about contemporary work.

That phase—the search—was the hardest for me. I had the entire canon of western theatrical literature at my disposal, and I couldn’t seem to find anything that worked for me.

Now, it’s nice to enrich yourself and all, but I still needed a scene. My first hunch was to go to my man David Mamet. I grew up in Chicago, and the first play I ever bought was Glengarry Glen Ross. I was probably drawn to the cursing at first, let’s be honest, but I’ve come to realize there’s something incredible about just how persuasive and aggressive language itself can be, without anything else. If the typical Chicago actor is throwing chairs and breaking sets (no offense meant—I’m one of them), every line of Mamet’s is a verbal thrown chair.

So I began mining Mamet’s work, but here’s where the other actor comes in. While I’m a Mamet guy—in fact, I had just gotten my Equity card on a production of Glengarry—there weren’t any others in my class. Not to say they couldn’t do it, but it just didn’t showcase them well. Oddly enough, some folks don’t want to spew a bunch of c-words in front of future employers, go figure. Not to mention, so much of Mamet’s power as a playwright comes from the piece as a whole. He’s great for six-minute scenes, or thirty-second rants, but it's tough to find that three-minute sweet spot in his work. It was back to the drawing board.

But sometimes, you have to trust your classmates. I am blessed with an incredible group of collaborators who are also friends. This is not true of all graduate schools—this is not even true of all classes at my graduate school. But as frustrations mounted, I started to be reminded of what I did have—a short-and-sweet politically themed scene from my first year that my scene partner was passionate about, and reminded me that I should be too. And a different scene from a play I found for a classmate because the female part was perfect for her, and as she pointed out, the other part was in fact perfect for me. Out of our mutual respect and honesty, the showcase began to emerge. One of my classmates uses a wheelchair—she wrote an incredible scene about just how awkward her love life can be—it was comic gold. Others pulled out a scene from a new play they had worked on two years earlier that had been written for them, and the rest of the class jumped on it. A classmate was missing a scene until another student pulled out a scene from his acting one class that would work perfectly.

Now the scene order is set, the work has been done—that’s the easy part, we all have MFAs, we know how to act once we have material—the transitions are in place, the furniture is packed, and we head to LA next week. Advice has been flooding in from all corners:

“What a beautiful headshot!”

“You need new pictures.”

“Take the theater off your resume.”

“You played Hamlet? Why isn’t that on here?”

“Move to LA. Before it’s too late. Especially you ladies—how old are you?”

“If you move to LA, you’ll never do theater again.”

“Sure you can go to New York. Do you want to work in regional theater for the rest of your life?”

(Is it wrong to say yes to that question?)

To be fair, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to have so many people interested in our success. It’s humbling and overwhelming. But the biggest lesson I’ve learned is it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Some folks will think you’re the worst actor ever, some will think you’re brilliant. All I can hope for is that there are enough of the latter to get me work somewhere. And if not, I have an MFA—I can get a job teaching, and, in a few years, get the next bunch ready for their own showcase.