I've decided to audition for a community theater play that is coming up in a few days.  I used to do some community theater when I was a teenager, including a couple of leading roles, but that was over 20 years ago.  I don't know what to expect from my attempted return to theater, and I'm understandably nervous.  At the old theater I used to work with, you just came in and the director sized you up and handed you a script to read based on the part he thought was best for you.

Do I need to be prepared to audition for a particular part, or do community theaters still do it like I was used to as a teenager?  It's a small group, probably about 20 active members in a town of only 20,000, so I'm hoping for something informal.  Just hoping for a little insight in to what the process is like these days.

Amen to that.  I recently had an audition with a good sized CT company, and most of the auditioners had worked with the director before, as she's done numerous shows with this company and others over quite a long period.  I'm still rather new, and didn't know her.

I suppose I made a good impression, because not only did I read pretty much every side on the table at least a couple times, but then she had me and a couple of the females stay over and had me do a few scenes with each of them -- they were setup scenes from the show, but we had to improv the dialog.

Thank God I'd read the play and had at least somewhere to start with each scene.