An Audition as a Work of Art

nothing popped!

4 out of 5 of the most moving theater pieces I have seen were clear, beautiful, soaring examples of team effort. Good theater tends to require good teamwork. But this week, the piece I am looking at is a loner: a 1-minute 1-man show.

(perhaps that's fitting - some of us only have a 60-second attention span, anyhow. 8 seconds to hook us, 30 seconds of thrills, and 60 seconds to land us somewhere different)

An advertiser and an agent could give us the specifics of best practices for what each second should be. Plenty of directors have written books about it. As a designer of things (as opposed to light or sound) timing is not what I have spent 40 years studying. So, I can’t tell you why those 60 seconds worked on a flow chart.

But I can tell you the thing James Ijames did in that minute that gave me such a huge feeling. He transformed. And he did it three times.