An audition piece is not a problem to be solved. And yet, I find that many actors are hyper focused with finding the “right answers” as quickly as possible. Your decisions will be right only if they connect you to your most alive and compelling qualities and then connect you out into the room with dynamic energy and intensity. Job-getting decisions are never the product of obsession and speed—they are the result of a focused period of exploration and the willingness to be wrong again and again.
The thing about creating art is that all of your exploration shows up in the finished product. There may have been 35 wrong attempts to find the best decisions, but they were all part of what got you to the truth. In this way, art is very much akin to science, where a new discovery is the product of endless experiments and incorrect results. Jonas Salk didn’t walk into a laboratory and intuitively figure out the vaccine for polio, he got to work and explored and experimented, knowing that wrong would be his constant companion for a long, long time.
I used to have a problem using the word “wrong”—especially as it pertained to art and acting, but I realized the problem wasn’t with the word,
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