Acting 1 : Monologues

Monologues, especially to young actors can be frightening. It makes sense. When most people think of monologues they don't think of doing them in the context of a show. They think instead of standing in front of one or more people, who they believe decide their theatrical career. They think of all the other people who just might be doing the same  monologue (maybe better than themselves). Of course, they also think of the horror stories of auditions. How directors almost always make up their mind in the first ten seconds. Of people forgetting their lines.

How can you get an entire class of people past all of these roadblocks and just have them do the damn thing? You must give them structure. What I've found most useful when I'm preparing a monologue is to know the facts. Before I do a monologue from a play I like having read the script at least twice. Actually, I almost always use one from a play that either I've spent an entire semester working on, or, at least analyzed in class. It's really interesting to me that some of the monologues in class were from monologue books. How the only facts are those found in the monologue itself. You must glean everything you can from a short paragraph. It think it's more obvious when one of the stand alone monologues haven't been fully developed because you absolutely have to make choices. 

After searching for all the facts I find it incredibly important to keep exploring. As I've said in previous post, every rehearsal is an experiment. What reaction do I get if I change this variable? If I spin this line a different way?

While watching the class work on these monologues I noticed a few things. Often, after a couple of days they would stop working it and stay sitting for most of the period, resolved in their belief that "it's not getting better than that." I also saw people reading and memorizing their lines from their phone, i pads, or laptops. I believe that not having a tangible copy of the script makes a difference. I'm not sure yet what kind of difference. I think it has something to do with how you can mark things and how feeling something's texture actually has an impact on how you memorize. A lot of the times I heard things like "I think he's angry here" or "she's should cry here" . Now, I understand that discussing emotion is necessary for acting and theatre, because it's all about humans and we are certainly emotional but I believe if we tie every emotion down to a fact it becomes stronger and grounded. Some people in the class understood this and I hear many " he's so and so because of so and so". By introducing the word because into the vocabulary of a young actor I believe you make him/her into a more empathetic and specific artist. It was so good to see that so many in the class had already introduce this into their preparation.

Many people in the class did very well, because they didn't take their monologues simply for what was floating at the surface.