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[0:00] Charlie Murphy: Hello, hello, and welcome to Mapping The College Audition and our Summer Break. I'm Charlie Murphy, Director of MTCA. That's Musical Theatre College Auditions. Check us out at mtca.com. I hope you're enjoying some fun in the sun, by the pool, whatever you want to be doing as you listen to this, which is the fourth of our four audio blogs for this summer. This is the last blog I just wrote for our June blog. It happens to be June as I record this, though it will be July as it's released, and who knows what month you'll be listening to this in. The world is your oyster, future listeners. We've got a few more Summer Break episodes for you before we roar back with brand new episodes in mid-August, and we'll sprint all the way to next June with nary another break in sight. I hope you're all doing beautifully out there. Enjoy!

[0:58] Charlie Murphy: All right, this blog is called Generosity and How it Applies to College Auditions. Hey y'all, happy June. This topic has been on my mind for a while, and I'm excited to dive into the concept of generosity. Principally, what it means to be a generous actor, a generous auditioner, and the idea of generosity as a counter to ego. For our regular podcast listeners, you will have heard this concept come up a few times recently in various takeaways, and it came up again recently in our conversation with Dean Nolan from Texas Tech. He talked about how much they're looking for generous actors, and we've heard different versions of this idea with different words from so many different faculty members over our 250-plus episodes.

The idea that schools are looking for kind, generous actors, for good human beings who will fit well within their community and be giving to their fellow classmates. Now, without always naming it, these faculty members are describing both a positive kind of actor student they're looking for and describing its opposite.

[2:01] Charlie Murphy: So let's take a moment and live in what the opposite might be, which would be an ungenerous actor. That's sometimes easier to define, right? We can all picture an ungenerous actor as someone who doesn't listen, doesn't care for or about their fellow castmates or classmates, and in short, is all about themselves. In a scene, a selfish actor might be constantly upstaging their fellow actors, stepping on laughs, or grabbing moments of spotlight. And if we can sit in empathy for a moment with this characterization of a selfish actor, at some level, all of us who've gone into this profession can understand these impulses, right? As the great Sir Lawrence Olivier is quoted as saying, when asked why he wanted to be an actor, he said, "the reason we do what we do, dear boy, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me."

And can't we all understand that need to be seen and validated and appreciated, especially in a competitive business, in a competitive process, where you're saying at some level, "pick me instead of them."

[3:02] Charlie Murphy: But why am I spending time outlining an arrogant actor in a blog about generosity? Because I think it's a really helpful framing to think about generosity as a counter to ego, as opposed to thinking of humility. Because it's a tricky tightrope we walk as actors, having the self-confidence and self-belief to walk in the room and say why it should be us, why what we have to share is special and worthy of a place at your program without teetering into arrogance. And I find so often with students, when they try to reckon with the fear of arrogance, they lead with something I like to call loud humility, which can manifest itself in performative apologizing and too much meekness. And one of the easiest things to dismiss in an audition room is a too meek actor. If you don't think you belong on that stage, neither will anyone else.

[4:05] Charlie Murphy: But a generous actor is something else. A generous actor is not meek. They have the confidence in who they are and their ability to stand in the spotlight, but they've gone one step further in being able to give it away. It takes much more confidence to be truly generous than to be arrogant. Right beneath the surface of arrogance, there's often deep insecurity, a need to prove yourself in order to believe in yourself. But beneath a generous actor is a beacon that says the rising tide of this performance will lift all ships. You know, I love to make sports analogies in the podcast and blog space, and one strikes me when you consider the best basketball players. Of course, go Knicks, we just won a championship.

The best players are able to score themselves, but also lift up their teammates and make them better. They're able to work toward getting their team the best shot with clarity of whether that means they need to take it or they should pass it to an open teammate.

[5:12] Charlie Murphy: But just like with performers, giving the ball up when you're no threat to score yourself is not actually useful. The other team could just not cover you at all, and it would actually make it harder on your team if you're constantly giving the ball up and never shooting. And the opposite, if you'll never pass the ball when they could triple team you, you'll actually never be able to score. That balance of being able to score and to have the confidence to take the shot, but also being open to the possibility that there's a better shot for your open teammate is the same balance we're looking for on stage. So how does this manifest in auditions? Certainly it is easier to show this kind of generosity when you're auditioning with a reader or a fellow actor, but there are many ways it can manifest even when you're doing songs and monologues alone. You can be generous with your accompanist, generous with your auditor, and generous to yourself.

[6:29] Charlie Murphy: What do I mean by being generous to yourself? Doesn't that kind of sound like a version of the selfish actor described above? Let's take the example where you're given an adjustment by a faculty member, meaning you've performed all of your material, but now they're telling you to try it again a different way. The arrogant actor might be resistant to feedback and respond defensively or not be willing to take an adjustment at all. But again, I see less of this specific archetype in auditions than the overly performatively humble actor who's quick to beat themselves up in an audition room. They might hear feedback and be so stuck in the idea that the faculty member hated it and what that means that they aren't actually able to take and make an adjustment successfully.

If the original run didn't go how they planned, they may hear the faculty give the adjustment but be so stuck beating themselves up on their own feedback from their original take that they don't really have space to add in the faculty feedback in a useful way. This is not being generous to yourself.

[7:01] Charlie Murphy: If instead as an actor you can live in the present, trust that whatever the run that happened was a valid run done by a talented actor, then you can move forward with taking the adjustment that was actually given to you while treating the faculty member like a colleague instead of giving them the power over this being the ultimate take that decides whether you're a good actor or not. This is being generous to yourself, to the person giving you the note, and maintaining that balance of healthy ego that allows you to belong on that stage alongside this faculty member and to give it a go based on the feedback. In the same way we talk about with contrasting songs and monologues that a big comedy isn't always the best contrast to a big dramatic piece, loud humility is not necessarily the opposite of loud ego. It takes a whole lot of self-confidence to be able to be truly generous as an actor, and that warm beacon of energy will attract people to you at the college level and into your professional career.

[7:39] Charlie Murphy: So that's my challenge to all of you. Can you do the work that you need in order to be truly confident in what you're doing and then can you give it away? All right, I hope you enjoyed that audio blog and please come back next week for some more summer break content and we'll be back with season six in August. Until then, enjoy your summers.