Monologue Studies

Since I forgot to blog yesterday and I'm due for a blog today, here's both days in one.

Tuesday:

I was working on my song when I realized that I really just couldn't do it anymore. I was getting bored with it, and kind of fed up with not succeeding. So, I stopped writing.

My problem? I never figured out my "side salad" project to work on when I'm not writing. So, I stopped by Luke's office and he told me to do something with acting and handed me a book called "The Monologue Audition: A Practical Guide for Actors" by Karen Kohlhass. From then on I started reading the book and working on my "side salad" project, which is monologues.

This book gave me all the basics for studying and performing monologues. On one page it gave a checklist that I now swear by before starting to act and it was this: "Who is the monologue addressing? Where is it found in the play? What happened up to this point in the play? Why is this character speaking this monologue now? What does the character want the other character(s) to do as a result of this monologue? What are the stakes? Does the character succeed or fail?" Along with these guidelines, there was a sample monologue in the point of view of a girl telling this boy named Johnny that she's always loved him. At first I thought that these introductory questions could really only apply to this particular monologue, but I realized as I started to search a few more up to test it, that the questions go with just about every monologue, and make it extremely easy to figure out your objective in the scene and how you should act it to the fullest extent. I really liked these points on the checklist, and I'm finding myself use them with all of the monologues I've been finding.

One thing in the book that really caught my eye and that I found really helpful was a technique the author described as "finding and isolating the climax," meaning taking the most intense part of the monologue, and making it it's own section and working around it. The author also used the same monologue about the girl loving that boy Johnny and applied it to this as well. She first left the monologue as is, and only bolded what she felt was the "climax" of the scene, which happened to be the line "Why didn't it happen between us? Why did I fail?" After this on a new page, she broke the scene into parts, still leaving the climax bolded and wrote about how each scene should be felt or acted based on what the climax line was. In this case, it was her complaining that they were never together, no matter how hard she tried. So the author wrote that in order to really make the climax line big, to portray the rest of the monologue as a "bitter happiness" so that the audience knows that the relationship never worked out from the beginning.

I also read a little about auditioning, and what to look out for and what to look for in an audition, and all of it was really helpful. I've decided I really really like this "side salad" project, and it's a really great break away from my songwriting project because it's something completely different.

Wednesday:

I continued reading a little more of the book today, but I got a little bored with it, so I decided that it was time to start looking for some actual monologues to work on, now that I really know the basics.

While talking to Luke, I learned that monologues from monologue books are completely frowned upon in the art world, and that the chances of even being chosen for a job while using a monologue from a book is slim. He advised me that the best way to find a monologue is to pull it from an actual play, because that's your best chance at finding a good monologue. He told me that you can sometimes find monologues from plays online, but the chances are slim, and you need to do really good research. So, that's what I decided to do. Really good research.

 I found a few monologues from some plays that I want to try, but I know that I defiantly want to work on one comedic and one serious monologue, so that I learn how to master both ends of the spectrum. I used this website:

http://www.stageagent.com/Shows/Monologues/

to really start my research in serious monologues, since I already have a comedic monologue in mind from the Off-Broadway Musical "Most Likely To: The Senior Superlative Musical" that is really funny and that I like a lot.

I learned a lot today while researching monologues, and how hard it is to find a really good one. I can't wait to find one that I really fall in love with and then dive into working on it. I haven't worked on a monologue in a really long time, and I'm excited to get back into it with my new found knowledge. I think I can pull off two really good monologues if I try really hard, and that's exactly what I intend to do.