My MFA audition at Yale in 2004

In 2004, after living at the Odin for two months, I flew to Yale for my interview. I was a finalist for their MFA in Directing program.

At home, I had directed a lot of Chekhov, so of the scenes Yale offered, I chose one from "Three Sisters." I asked Eugenio for permission to borrow the three Odin apprentice actors to explore the scene. He agreed.

I will talk more about that another time.

One day, I got into the small car in back of the theatre in Holstebro and got driven to the airport. The next morning, in New Haven, I found a flower shop and bought a vase full of fat yellow tulips.

The audition allowed us to bring two props. I brought an ordinary Danish good-quality cream-colored cotton tablecloth edged in lace, and flowers.

Yale was beautiful. Stone, and heavy, and bright-washed with March sunlight.

The room for the audition was industrial. It had a white ceiling with giant air conditioning ducts suspended from it, also painted white. Some of the rooms had black rubber flooring; our room had hardwood, or linoleum; I forget.

What I remember is how busy and fast-moving everyone was -- the actors, the auditors, the students.

"We probably won't get to Chekhov today," I thought, as we set up the room. I find Chekhov emanates out of the actors, once they have become settled and pure. I did not think we would likely achieve this in 30 minutes.

The auditors sat at a table. Three men and a woman. I and the two student actors who had been provided worked in front of them, in a big empty space with a table and two chairs. The actors were a man and a woman who had memorized the lines, and had volunteered to do this rehearsal in addition to their already-busy schedules. They were eager to do well, and to impress their teachers; nervous that they would fail.

I sat them in a circle. I gave a short opening talk. It was not very good. I was nervous and had not prepared remarks. I gave up, stood us up, and started the familiar walking and statues work, to connect and ground ourselves. It helped, but was still happening at that frantic busy surface level. The actors faces were in grimaces, rictus smiles or fearful concentration. "Don't think," I kept saying in a soothing voice. "Don't think. Don't think. No one is thinking. This is all happening by itself."

Okzy. So, okay.

We start the backstory improvs. I want to create some time for them to experience their true life, their authentic memories of Moscow, from whose roots this play sprang -- the play within the play that no one will know but them. "We are going back in time, to when the family lived in Moscow. To the first time Vershinin came to visit, when Masha was a little girl, which she still remembers. This was an extremely unimportant event. Very trivial. Let us see this ordinary moment." I had had the actors set up a beautiful upper-class family living room. It had a cream-colored tablecloth from Denmark, and a vase of yellow tulips on the side table. Vershinin came to visit. They had their moment.

We went forward in time. We had another ordinary moment. They started to get more comfortable as the work took hold.

"And now, we go forward a bit more, to when the family is about to move away. They have been packing the house. They will be moving soon. Vershinin comes to visit again." Before we started, I had asked the actors to move all the furniture again, as if it were being prepared for packing. They folded the table, moved the items to the side.

"And in this visit, it happens that Vershinin and Masha have a private moment. Perhaps it is unimportant. It is a moment no one but Masha and Vershinin will ever know happened. Please go outside the room, and have this moment. Do not return until it has happened. Take your time."

The actors were nervous and excited. They glanced at their teachers, at me, and left.

We sat in silence.

It was the first peaceful moment I had felt at Yale.

I sat on the floor, 15 feet from the judges, my back to them, watching the door. The judges sat at their table, watching me and the door.

Minutes passed. No one moved.

The room was sunlit. The air was white. You could hear traffic, the rumbling of the pipes, voices, but the noise was muffled. Sunlight. Silence.

"Oh," I said, suddenly, turning to face the judges. Their eyes brightened, and got happy. "Did you notice how -- " and then the actors came back in. The judges' faces fell, bereft.

What I was going to say was, "Did you notice how much better the set was when the actors thought it didn't matter; when they were just getting the furniture ready for moving, and not trying to make it look good?" I never got to tell them; a Chekhovian moment.

The actors were better after their time alone. Still not fully grounded, but they had glimpsed the dream and were feeling its gravitational pull, starting to vanish.

I worked a bit more, but my time soon ended. We thanked the actors and they left.

The judges asked questions. I answered. It was like we were all puzzled by something; we couldn't find the comfortable vein of talking. Then one of them said, "Rachel, do you want to come to the Yale School of Drama? Don't think." "No," I blurted. "It would cost $100,000 and then how would I start my theatre?" We all rustled and relaxed. "I thought there was something off," said the woman who was the head of the program. "But I couldn't put my finger on it."

We were all relieved.

My "No" was correct. But the reason I gave was only partially correct; there was also something about This is not my home and This is not how I work and I don't want to leave my house in the woods and most fundamentally, This is not a fit.

We sat and talked companionably for the remaining 20 minutes.

"Good decision," said the head of the program. "You are on the rare slow road. Don't get off that. Here, we are on the fast road. We are training them for American theatre, which is like an aircraft carrier -- you have to get the plays UP and ON and LAUNCHED and you only have a few weeks to do it all."

At the end, they all gave me their business cards.

"I think we will be hearing a lot more from you," they said.

And then, matter-of-factly, cheerful at having had a tough decision make itself so cleanly, they walked refreshed back into their busy lives.

I folded the Danish tablecloth, picked up the vase of tulips, and walked outside, relieved to find myself in clean air, and free.

At one point during the questioning, I said something about the actors. They asked me what I thought of each actor. I answered. These were long and thoughtful answers, because I was searching for each answer as I was saying it; reflecting on the actors and who they were becoming; looking at them with Russian and Odin and bootcamp eyes. This was probably the most informative part of the entire audition. They knew the actors very well. They could absolutely calibrate my responses. It was in this answer, of everything I said or did, that they could most clearly see me. I also had the clear sense that some of what I said they agreed with or already knew, and some of what I said was new, unusual. There was that "hmmm" of interest.