Finding my mentor

I was in a great acting class that I loved, but I didn't feel challenged enough by it. I had lots of fun and I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do in auditions and I felt like I grew a lot; but then I hit a plateau. I still felt lost when looking at scripts...I knew I had to give them levels, I knew I had to make stronger choices but I didn't know how to.

Enter my wonderful manager. He coached me through a monologue, but he noticed I wasn't getting the basics of acting like I should have been. I knew how to do a cold read, but he pointed out that most auditions aren't cold reads. I could make initial strong choices, but I wasn't getting the depth of out the scenes and I wasn't making them real and organic enough.

So yesterday I went to audit a new acting coach. She's an absolutely brilliant coach, but the class is painfully slow for a beginner. I can't go two weeks on one exercise. If I had a scene I could study it for two weeks, but to improv a simple scene seems too slow for two weeks for me. I'm well aware that acting is a craft, but I don't have 3 years to spend in a beginner class before I move onto scene study.

That too worries me. I've heard the saying, "Don't give it five minutes if you aren't willing to give it five years" and I've heard that it takes ten years to make a career, but how long until I'm able to work?

Surely just studying for 5 or 10 years isn't going to suddenly make you a regular booking actor. It takes time to build up to that, and I'm looking for a teacher that can help me now both learn the basics and teach me how to book those co-star roles. I'm looking for a teacher that will let me do scenes to really explore the character. And I'm mostly looking for a teacher that will teach me HOW to make choices, not just give me choices that I can mirror.

So the auditing search continues.