I am currently working privately with students on a sliding scale. My primary expertise is monologue coaching for agents, undergraduate and graduate school auditions.
During my time at Williamstown Theatre Festival, I auditioned 500 actors for 10 years, so that’s 5,000 auditions! I auditioned actors from NYU Grad, YALE, Juilliard, Brown, UCSD, Carnegie Mellon, BU, SUNY Purchase and learned what it takes to have a successful audition.
In the beginning stages of your career, monologues are your calling cards and once you get an agent, you won’t need them again. It’s amazing how many opportunities can be lost if you don’t have good material that suits you, uniquely you. Talented actors can make mistakes in regards to material selection and pitching their performance appropriately for the room. Coaching will help actors select and perfect the ideal monologues for graduate school, non-equity/apprentice companies, agents, and directors. I try to find material from newer plays that hasn’t been produced.
I teach with Keira Naughton and the testimonials below are for our class.
“I got into Juilliard after working with y’all in your class. I’m so grateful for the space you ladies create.
—Therese Barbato
The Juilliard School
“I LOVED THIS CLASS! Amanda encourages her students to draw on the most unique parts of themselves — I left her class not only armed with the monologues I needed to audition for grad school, but also with the feeling that they were deeply personal to ME; that I was doing them my way, as opposed to the way I thought I was “supposed” to. In addition, it was a gigantic gift to be in a class full of other people who were going through the same experience — it’s a pretty strange journey and her class made me feel more courageous and less alone. Whoa, that’s heavy. But true!”
—Sophie von Haselberg
Yale
“Amanda and Keira are an incredible team. Approaching monologues as a director and actor respectively, they make sure that both the internal and physical lives of the character are being embodied and expressed at all times. They boil a monologue down to its essence so that you can tell your story most effectively and reveal who you are as an artist in the process. They also have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to new plays and playwrights, and they have a deep and current connection to what graduate acting programs are looking for. I firmly believe I would not have gotten into Juilliard without their help. They consistently steered me in the right direction and made me a better actor in the process.”
—Miles Jacoby
The Juilliard School
“If you’re considering auditioning for graduate schools, no class offers you the guidance, insight, and mentorship that this one does. Keira and Amanda were able to tease out our own aesthetic desires and help us know where to focus our energies. They helped us navigate our academic options school by school, recommended specific playwrights and pieces to us based not simply on our outward “type” but on our spirit as well, and made themselves available to us via email throughout the audition process. They are alert to the realities of audition skills, and helped us decide what to wear, what headshots to use, and how to best present ourselves, but they never valued navigating these realities above the work itself. They are a perfect balance of classical and contemporary insight, with very different coaching styles that meld seamlessly together throughout class. If one direction is not resonating for you, another will most certainly be close on its heels that will. I had auditioned for grad schools before without the benefit of this class, and I felt so much more empowered to give of my authentic self after all that investigation. They made the audition itself feel like an important gesture of artistic faith, a creative process and a statement of purpose rather than just a means to an end. But ends were indeed met: I am attending my dream school and I’m overflowing with gratitude for it. You will never be sorry to have invested your time in learning from these incredible women, and if you are lucky, their voices will ring in your ears for years to come.”
—Summer Broyhill
M.F.A., The Old Globe