London - Contemporary American Monologues for Women

CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN
MONOLOGUES
FOR WOMEN

CONTEMPORARY

AMERICAN

MONOLOGUES

FOR WOMEN

EDITED BY TODD LONDON

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Copyright 1998 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.

Introduction, An Actor Chooses, and monologue introductions copyright 1998 by Todd London.

Contemporary Monologues for Women is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 100170217.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of these plays by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the authors representative in writing.

Owing to limitations of space, all individual copyrights, authors representatives and contact information is included in the Further Reading chapter at the end of the book.

This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Contemporary American monologues for women / Todd London, editor. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 9781559367639

1. ActingAuditions. 2. Monologues. 3. American drama20th century.

4. Womendrama. I. London, Todd.

PN2080.C646 1997

Cover design by Paula Scher

Book design and composition by Lisa Govan

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, St. Paul, MN 551141065

First Edition, January 1998

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The playwrights whose words appear in this volume are, of course, its authors. They have been consistently encouraging, generous and remarkably tolerant of the piecework Ive made of their art. Im grateful to them all.

Special thanks to Nancy C. Jones, Kerry Lowe and Timothy Mennel, who did much of the hard labor on this book. Thanks, too, to Gino Dilorio, Nancy Piccione, the writers and staff of New Dramatists and, especially, Terry Nemeth.

My deepest appreciation goes, always, to Juanita and Guthrie.

Editors note: Many of the monologues that follow have been cobbled together to make sense out of context. Where lines of dialogue or stage directions have been cut, three open boxesmark the deletion.

CONTENTS

This collection has a simple aim: to make matches. Youre an actor searching for the right monologuefor auditions or acting classand here are cuttings from dozens of the most exciting American plays of the past two decades. The material might be said to be searching, too. Its on the lookout for actors who will connect deeply, who have the emotional availability and the craft to deliver these monologues into the world with their complexity intact. It seeks actors who think on their feet, who understand in their bodies the impression contemporary life makes on a character. Like any matchmaker, though, this book offers only an introduction. The work is left to you.

Some of the excerpts collected here will read like nothing else youve found. Some are more difficult than others, some more strange, but they all offer a freshness of voice, an originality that can only be fully felt/heard/appreciated in context. So, I encourage you, once youve discovered a monologue you like (or two or ten), to read the complete play. (In the interview that follows, Nancy Piccione, one of New Yorks most respected and experienced casting directors, offers the same advice.) Theyre all published and easy to lay hands on.

This volume gathers solos from well-made plays, autobiographical performances, experimental playwriting and unabashedly political theatre. Often, these scripts mix dramatic or tragic tones with comic and farcical oneseven in the same monologue. Thematically, too, while many of these writers tackle matters of life and death, love and lossthemes with great traditions in the theatrethey also go where plays havent gone in quite the same ways before. Racial identity, female sexuality, political domination, psychobabble, food art, age, evil, AIDS, motherhood, life after deathits all here, dished up with fierce intelligence and terrific wit. You cant make rich sense of any of it from a single speech.

This book assumes not only that you love to act but also that you love to read plays. Thats one of the reasons its divided into named chapters instead of into more standard categories, such as age range, or dramatic and comic. Also, more than a few of these monologues can be played in a variety of ways by a variety of types of actors. As mentioned above, the sensibilities of contemporary playwriting make it harder, too, to classify works as comic or dramatic. Is a paranoid teenager afraid of a garbage disposal merely funny? What about a psychologist who gouges her eyes out when her last patient quits therapy or a semiliterate girl who mangles Shakespeares poetry even as it seeps into her heart?

These monologues are grouped (and the groups titled) with the hope of sparking an immediate connection. Theyre organized by subject (women and food, life with men, artistic aspiration), by emotional impulse (I thought my heart would burst) and by action (Dreaming ahead). Some headings are designed to suggest a common thread of character or predicamentWhy dont you talk to a psychiatrist? for example. You might want to thumb through the book the way you would an anthology of short stories or poems, until one piece grabs you and inspires you to try it out. Or, if you need information about age and character type right off the bat, go straight to the introductory paragraphs, and theyll tell you what you need to know. Theres a range of womens experience represented here, for actors of every age, temperament and ethnic background, actors of every stamp.

This book has another aim, too, shared by its publisher, Theatre Communications Group, from whose playlist these brave new works are culled. That goal is to get new American plays out into the world. For this mission, too, the interests of actors and playwrights overlap. Actors need words, and writers need real voices for their interior ones; you need compelling roles, and they need disciplined, resilient actors to breathe stage life into their characters. Both want to make thrilling, important theatre. Neither can do so without the other. Its a natural match.