#18 | 6.23.23 - How AI helped my audition / The Difference Between Busy and Non-Busy People / 36 Questions to Fall In Love

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🎭 How AI helped my audition

Two things I’ve written about before here are AI (specifically, ChatGPT & Google Bard), as well as my passion for live theatre (both watching and performing it). What I haven’t written about (or experienced, really) is the intersection of those two.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been involved in an audition process for our local theatre. The theatre is casting for its upcoming season, and there are 4 shows of which you could be considered.

Step 1 is to pick out (and memorize) two contrasting monologues, each about a minute in length. For my audition, I chose a piece from Ken Ludwig’s Sherwood, and a piece from Clue. Then I picked my audition slot and went and performed those for a panel of directors.

Then came step 2.

Step 2 was “callbacks”, and the name is just as it sounds. The directors are calling you back to see more content. Generally, callbacks are more specific to the shows the team is casting - actors will often read (or sing, if it’s a musical) pieces from the specific show to give the directors a better idea of where you could fit.

For this process, we were given a packet of scenes from the 4 upcoming shows. One of the jobs of an actor is to know as much as possible about the person/scene, so that it’s truthful to you when you’re performing it.

For this step, this is where AI came in.

A couple of the shows in our packet, I have never read or seen performed. So usually, I would buy the script and try to cram it all in. Well, there wasn’t time to do this, so enter AI (Google Bard). Here’s the actual prompts I used:

Prompt: “Are you familiar with the play, _____________”

Answer: “Yes, I am. It’s a play about _____________”

Prompt: “Great. When the character _______ says the line ________________, tell me what’s going on in the play before and after that.”

Answer: “Sure. The reason she said that is because ______________ happened before, and ____________ will happen in Act 2.”

Prompt: “Tell me about the relationship between ________ and _____________”.

Prompt: “What are some ways this character could be portrayed truthfully?”

Through all these prompts, and the answers that were quite descriptive, I feel like I had so much better of a grasp on the content than I would have without it. Who knows how the casting decisions will go (we are scheduled to find out next week!) but wow, what a resource this is for actors preparing to learn about characters they’ll be presenting to others!

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🕘 The Difference Between Busy and Non-Busy People

This article made me think - a lot! There’s so much wisdom here, tough questions and practical counsel.

“Activity is good, but we can become too busy. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Great stuff here.

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❓ The 36 Questions To Fall In Love

Well this is a fun one!

Is it possible for two individuals to develop romantic feelings by engaging in a deliberate sequence of questions? This is the underlying concept of the renowned "36 questions that lead to love," which is a widely discussed experiment that began with an influential article making its way around the internet. What’s crazy is these questions were developed in the 90’s!

Words to wrap up:

“One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency” - Arnold Glasow