The Maybe

In defense of the mess

On July 10th, thousands of people lined up to audition for the new revival of Spring Awakening. The producers saw around 2,500 of them.

Some folks on the internet decided the whole thing was a marketing play. Twenty-five hundred props for a content campaign. And I get it. The casting call was packaged into a highlight reel while people were still warming up in stairwells. When a producer points a camera at your hope, it's fair to ask what the camera is for.

But I think the fight online is about something bigger.

Because an audition—especially an open call like this one—is already one of the heaviest things a person can voluntarily do. And when a few thousand people do it at once, in public, on camera, all the contradictions this business usually keeps backstage come out to stand in the line too.

That's what I want to get into this week: the mess of the maybe that runs through all of show business—and why we keep trying to wrestle it into something simpler than it actually is.

Sign in.

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Around the Block

In March of 2020, an open call for a national tour of Hairspray at Pearl Studios drew a line that ran the length of an avenue, around the block, and down another avenue—until they had to shut down an entire floor of the building because it got too crowded.

Nobody called that a stunt.

Open calls have always been mob scenes, because they're required to be open. Every Equity production has to hold them. It's in the contract—the union's whole point—the door that stays open so the industry isn't only appointments and connections and who-you-happen-to-know. Thousands of people, one long shot, a door somebody is obligated to leave unlocked.

That's the maybe the whole system runs on: anyone can walk in and take the chance. Spring Awakening didn't dream it up. They just posted a public invitation to it.

So "it was just marketing" gets the order backwards. The call was first. The post came second.

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The Front Door

Spring Awakening was built on open calls.

The original 2006 company—the one that became a whole generation's entire personality—was largely discovered in rooms exactly like this one. Kids with no names yet, singing sixteen bars for Michael Mayer. One of them, a now Tony winner, sang a song from Rent at his open call and walked out with a Broadway career.

Rent, by the way, is the patron saint of the whole idea—a show about people on the margins that made a point of casting people from the margins.

That's the myth of the open call. It's the front door—the one place the machine has to let anyone walk in. Sometimes they don't hire a soul. Once in a while, it changes a life. Either way, it's the closest thing this business has to putting its money where its mouth is when it says that everyone gets a shot.

Which is why, when it looks like a stunt, it stings. You only feel betrayed by something you believed in.

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The Count

The (valid) argument goes like this: they took 2,500 people's hope and turned it into free advertising.

And the anger isn't stupid. There's something real underneath it—the sense that showing up in person, before the sunrise, ought to mean more than an impression; that those are people in that line, with their own mornings and their own nerve, standing there because they wanted something badly enough to lose sleep over it.

But the producers weren't the only ones with a camera out.

Scroll long enough and you'll find the auditioners filmed it themselves. Get-ready-with-me for my Spring Awakening call. The 4am alarm. The subway at dawn. Live updates from outside the building, callbacks announced in real time, the whole nervy day narrated to a front-facing camera. The people we're told got used were authoring the exact same day—for themselves, on purpose.

So who used whom? The question falls apart, because everyone was doing everything everywhere all at once. It was marketing. It was also a genuine search for real people—I wrote almost that exact sentence a year ago, about the hunt for Dolly. But even two undersells it. It was a rite. A reunion. A dare a few thousand people made with themselves at six in the morning. A Tuesday.

Nothing that gets 2,500 people to stand outside in the New York City summer heat is doing just one thing.

Maybe it wasn't one thing. Or two things. Maybe it was all of it.

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Nerve

Think about what an audition actually asks of a person.

You walk into a room, stand in front of strangers who hold all the power, and ask them to choose you. Then you go home and wait. There's no more exposed thing a person can do with their clothes on.

Your body treats it as exactly what it is: a threat. Being judged by people who can change your life triggers the same cortisol, the same adrenaline, the same bracing a body does when something's chasing it. You're on a tightrope, and your nervous system can feel the drop.

The uncertainty is the worst part. Researchers at UCL once ran a game where people might get a mild electric shock. The ones told they'd definitely be shocked stayed calmer than the ones told they only might be. A fifty-fifty maybe spiked more stress—and more cortisol—than a guaranteed yes or a guaranteed no. The hardest thing a nervous system can sit in is a maybe.

Which is the whole architecture of an audition: total exposure and total uncertainty, at the same time. Of course the body wants down. Of course it wants a clean landing—an answer, solid ground that ends the not-knowing.

So when the internet demands to know what the open call really was, it's grabbing for the exact thing every person in that line wanted too. Something to hold onto. A story that resolves. The relief of one settled answer.

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The Maybe

And still, thousands of them showed up anyway.

Everyone was equally at the mercy of that room, which might be why the line was so generous. Strangers hyped each other up. Someone held your spot so you could find a bathroom. You got a "break a leg" from a face you'd never see again.

That warmth was real, and it's also what made the campaign work. The clip that sells the show is the same clip of people being unbelievably brave together, and there's no honest way to pull the two apart.

What those thousands actually did was harder than it looks. They stood in the most uncertain place there is—raw, waiting, no answer coming for who knows how long—and didn't demand it turn simple. They held the maybe. The least we can do, from the safety of our feeds, is hold it too.

Can something be sacred and strategic at the same time? Can we let a thing stay messy without crushing it into a binary choice? Can we take a breath and find the beauty in the in-between?

Maybe.

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This week in One Last Thing: what twelve years of maybe actually does to a person—the resentment it can breed, and what I'm still learning six months after BEAU closed.

One Last Thing is for paid subscribers ($5/month), which keeps The Fourth Wall independent and alive. Either way, I'm glad you're here.