Scott Kaiser reflects on his 19-year-old Juilliard audition

In a column for americantheatre.org, master teacher, director, and author Scott Kaiser reflects on auditioning for Juilliard at age 19 with Richard of Gloucester’s opening speech, recalling the rookie mistakes he made and the perspective he gained over the years.

Auditioning for Juilliard With Uncoached Monologues

Reflecting on his sophomore year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during a cold winter, Kaiser recalls flying to New York City to audition for Juilliard’s prestigious acting program. Armed with two uncoached monologues—Tom Stoppard’s “the box speech” from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) and the opening speech from Shakespeare’s Richard III—he walked straight into a rehearsal studio with zero outside preparation. He admits to making three glaring rookie errors during his performance of the classical piece. First, he made direct eye contact with the auditors behind the table instead of treating the lines as a direct address to an imaginary audience, prompting an irritated auditor to gesture upward and force an awkward mid-performance adjustment. Second, he performed the speech using a British accent modeled entirely after Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film version. Third, he physically forced his body into Richard’s deformity by squeezing his right shoulder up to his ear and pressing an upturned fist against his sternum.

Kaiser Repeats Pieces and Performs as a Snake

Despite those early missteps, the faculty called Kaiser back for a second round on the exact same day. After dashing out of a matinee performance of A Chorus Line at Lincoln Center to make the audition, he repeated his pieces before a new, stony-faced panel of auditors. The room threw two unusual requests at the petrified teenager: first, to demonstrate being a snake, which resulted in him slithering across the floor and wrapping around a chair leg; second, an older woman with an English accent approaching him, looking inside his gaping mouth, uttering a simple “hmm,” and returning to her seat. Kaiser later identified that woman as legendary speech teacher Edith Skinner, surmising she was diagnosing the source of his stuffy, de-nasal resonance caused by chronic allergies. A month later, a thin envelope arrived confirming his rejection from the incoming cohort.

Directorial Insights on Richard III Fifteen Years Later

Kaiser notes that his first professional encounter with the play arrived 15 years later, in 1993, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival under the direction of James Edmondson. During that run, Juilliard-trained actor Marco Barricelli portrayed Richard III by wearing a heavy metal leg brace, a wire shoulder hump, and a black glove to exaggerate the character’s physical deformities. Analyzing the dramatic structure of the opening 40-line speech, Kaiser points out that it consists of only five sentences divided neatly into three distinct movements, each advancing the argument with the words “Now,” “But,” and “And therefore.” He expresses pride in his 19-year-old self for choosing a villainous sociopath over a traditional juvenile role, proving that he knew early on he was built to be a transformational character actor.

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