Monologues

Okay, here's my thing about monologues. Monologues are the worst possible way to audition someone. They just are. Yet everyone continues to use them because they are the easiest for the auditors. Let me back up.

For those of you who don't know, a monologue is a piece of dialogue that just one character says. You've got one guy talking for an extended period of time with nobody else interrupting him, that's a monologue. You've got one dude by himself on stage "talking things out," that's a monologue (or sometimes a soliloquy). There are (in my mind) two basic types of monologues - storytelling monologues and active monologues.

A storytelling monologue usually starts with something like, "When I was four years old, I remember my daddy comin' in from the fields one day with a look on his face that I had never before seen in my life..." and continues on to tell the audience about this horrible day wherein the speaker learned that her mother died in a tragic tractor incident because daddy had been drinkin' too much again. It's a story. Which is what a lot of monologues are - stories. Think about a normal conversation. When you are speaking for a long time without anybody else interrupting, you're usually telling a story of some sort, yes? That's what these monologues are - they are an opportunity for the playwright to impart some important bits of information to us, the audience, about the character. And that's fine. Most acting teachers and coaches will tell you to stay away from these monologues for the purposes of an audition, though, because let's face it, they're boring. Unless you are going to re-inact finding your mother mutilated in the field and then flail your fists against the air as if it were your father's chest as you pounded on him in grief, they're boring. And nobody actually tells a story that way, so you really just end up looking silly acting out something that happened when you were three.

There are also active monologues wherein you are trying to get the other person in the scene with you to do something. Or, in the case of Hamlet's famous soliloquy, you are trying to figure out a puzzle that is driving you nuts. These are the monologues you should use for auditions (except maybe not Hamlet's soliloquy because it's been done a million times over and they do recommend you try to do something a smidge original, but let's face it, there are only so many Shakespeare monologues, right? He's not writing anything new at the moment). These monologues have actions and objectives and all of those lovely things that actors ask themselves (and their directors) about during the preparation. What do I want? What I am trying to achieve? How am I trying to get that with these words? And since you are often trying to get something from another party in these monologues, you have something to focus on, which is good.

Except when you use these monologues in an audition, there is nobody else on the stage with you. They usually tell you not to use the auditors as your point of focus either because auditors don't like being yelled at, sworn at, or (believe it or not) seduced in the middle of audition. So all of this time that you have been preparing yelling at your husband for not treating you the way you should be treated, you get there and there is no husband. You don't get to experience him walking away in the middle of your speech and having to use the next words to get his attention again. You don't get the feeling of him pushing you away from him to motivate screaming the next line at him. And if you do decide to scream the next line in the audition setting, you have a 50/50 chance of coming off as brilliant or as a complete psycho who has no business on stage.

So you walk into the audition room, with your pieces memorized and worked on with your coach or your teacher and you do them the way you prepared them for this particular audition. Which is not the way they would ever actually be performed if you were doing them in a show because when you take this paragraph out of context, it needs a little tweaking to hold up as a real piece. And of course, in the real show, you'd have the reactions of your fellow actors to work off of and the appropriate costume, but you have to go into the audition knowing that they're not holding that against you because they just want to see you and what you can do. Except it's not really you because if it was you, you'd be wearing your favorite jeans and flip flops (which are NOT real shoes, I don't care how many bows and flowers and sparkly things you put on them) and your hair would be in a messy ponytail because you didn't have time to shower after going to the gym and you would never be saying these words anyway. So what the auditor is NOT seeing is you. They're not seeing how you work. They're not seeing how you perform. They're not even necessarily seeing what you would do with this character because it's highly likely that any impulses you once had about this person have been coached right out of you in order to make the piece "audition ready." They are seeing you walk into a room, spout some words, and leave, all the while trying to be exactly what they are looking for.

You know what? You will never be exactly what they are looking for. Never. Or maybe once out of every ten thousand auditions you go to will you fit the bill exactly as you walk in with your obscure Russian monologue that nobody has ever heard of before. And you will not be what they are looking for because while you may nail that obscure Russian monologue, they are not doing that obscure Russian play. They are doing some contemporary clowning piece and really want to know if you can move and speak. You walked into the room without falling down - hooray! You have a voice that carries - hooray! If you pass those hurdles, you might make it to callbacks if they happen to be looking for a white female of average height and weight with shoulder-length hair. This is why they give you sides to read at a callback - so they can see if you really are what they are looking for. What do you do with this specific character? What are your impulses in this particular setting when you have not had the life coached out of you yet? How do you work extemporaneously with people you've never met before?

I don't mean to rip on coaches or theaters that use monologues for auditions. Coaches are very helpful and can point out things you may have missed to take your performance to the next level. But I think it is important to note that no coach will make you "audition proof." No matter what it is they tell you to do, another coach or another director or another auditor will always want you to do something else. There is no perfect way to perform a monologue - there is always room for interpretation. And somebody is always going to want to see a different interpretation.

And theaters have a lot to think about when they are putting a show together. I have been to callbacks where they are just then deciding what sides people should read - there is a lot to take care of to prep for auditions. So yes, it is easy to ask people to come in with a monologue, and you can at least weed out who fell down when they walked in and who didn't. But I think it is far more useful to the theater, and helpful to the actor, to do auditions with sides. The actor gets to show what kind of work they put in to preparing a character - specifically the character you would like to see them play. And the director gets to see if the actor really is right for the gruff cowboy, or if he'd be better suited for the kindly saloon owner one step earlier in the process. It just eliminates the time used in evaluating monologues that you'll never ask to see again and that have little to nothing to do with the play at hand. Gets the ball rolling sooner, so to speak.

There are, of course, auditions for which assigning someone a specific character doesn't really work. Season generals, for example, when they might be looking to cast four or five shows at a time. There, they want to see your versatility as an actor so they might ask you to do pieces. Which means shorter pieces. With the thought processes sped up so you get them both in under two minutes. Taking them even farther away from an actual performance setting performance. I can see why monologues are kind of useful here, but still, they suck and there is going to be one auditor who loves you and one who thinks you should just go home. That's just the way it is.

I could just be grumpy today, and if that is the case, I apologize. Or maybe I just suck at doing monologues. I tend to get called back and/or cast more often when my auditions include reading from sides than doing monologues, so maybe I'm just prejudiced and if that is the case, I apologize. But I would like to find someone who thinks they are the greatest thing since sliced bread and have a chat with that person to find out why. Because very seldom is the theater about just one person. So why do we all have to work so hard to be just one person in order to get onto the team that is making this film/play/acrobatic stunt show happen?

I'm done venting. For now. Sorry.