But Gregory Mosher, the distinguished director who now runs the Hunter College theater department, protests: “I don’t get the audition tape thing.”

“First, actors aren’t commodities,” he said. “It’s ridiculous to order one online as if she were a garden hose. Second, a few minutes isn’t nearly enough information.”

He prefers to see auditions as a chance for both parties to get a deep sense of each other. “At a certain point,” he said, “the question isn’t whether the actor can play the part, which of course they can. The question is whether we — they’re checking me out, too — want to enter into each other’s dream lives for six months.”

A few actors, to be sure, love the new distance. Alessandro Nivola, the theater-trained film star of the upcoming “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark,” said, “The anxiety about going into those rooms and waiting, I just couldn’t do it anymore … the self-tape changed my life completely. I just did it in my bedroom. I immediately was getting better responses from the auditions I was doing myself than I had for most of the ones I had done in the room.”

More actors feel islanded by the new order. Raul Esparza, a Tony-nominated Broadway actor and the star of “Law and Order,” acknowledged that he often self-tapes to get work, even as the process edges toward absurdity.

Auditioning for a superhero movie, “I wasn’t told the name of the film, role or the plot, and was asked to tape a scene from ‘Good Will Hunting.’” The feedback was, “Listen, they loved you, but you weren’t exactly right for it.”

What wasn’t he right for? “Good Will Hunting”? Or an unknown hero in an unseen script? The new system may be winning, but it’s not always working.