Audition

The protagonist of Auditions is an actress whose approach to her craft is defined by her complete immersion into the subjective, fictional reality of the character she plays. This approach informs the shift in her dynamic with Xavier when she comes to embrace the fiction that she is his mother; her motivation for this shift is her need to address the growing gulf between herself and her husband, Tomas. Although the book never explicitly connects the narrator’s approach to a particular school of thought, the narrator’s philosophy bears some resemblance to method acting: a series of techniques developed from the theories of a Russian theater practitioner named Konstantin Stanislavski.

Stanislavski’s ideas were then further refined by American acting coach Lee Strasberg, who approached method acting from a psychological perspective and proposed that actors should rely on “affective memory” to enhance their performances. This technique requires actors to recall personal experiences and use their authentic emotional reactions to these memories in order to simulate the emotions that their character is supposed to be feeling in a specific scene. In order to achieve this, actors must become intimately acquainted with their characters and actively associate experiences from their real lives with moments from their characters’ lives. The intended effect of this approach is to enhance the performance with a layer of reality that elicits a visceral response from the audience. Some of Strasberg’s most prominent students include James Dean, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro.

In Part 1, Chapter 5 of the novel, the narrator describes her acting approach in terms of immersion, stating, “You can be entranced by an idea, […] and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it […]. In some ways the part is only working if I lose sight of the shore” (66). This explanation sheds light on the transformation that her relationship with Xavier undergoes in Part 2, where she starts referring to herself as his mother despite her deep knowledge that it is physically impossible for her to be his mother. In Part 2, Chapter 8, the narrator more explicitly demonstrates her application of the Method in her arrangement with Xavier. In this scene, she looks at Xavier’s scarf and imagines its likely origins, then creates a fictional backstory for it that allows her to have an emotional reaction to its existence. This moment in the narrative is meant to serve as a demonstration of the psychological processes that compel the narrator to twist her own reality to accommodate the role that Xavier wants her to play.