Instructions
PLEASE select ONE monologue from the five below. You may choose the one which speaks to you the most, regardless of gender. They are appropriate for any identification. Monologues must be memorized and are required for both pre-screening and audition.
From Slings and Arrows by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, Mark McKinney
A Director is explaining to the insufferable Claire, who is playing Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, what her mad scene is really about. (Claire has been weaving about while speaking her lines — to “simulate madness” — and has said to the Director “I can’t take any meaning from the text. Ophelia is just singing nonsense songs.”)
DIRECTOR: Ophelia is a child. She has been dominated by powerful men all of her life and suddenly they all disappear. Her brother goes to France. Her father is murdered by her boyfriend and he is shipped off to England. She is alone for the first time, grieving and heartbroken and guilty because, as far as she’s concerned, it’s all her fault. She ignored her brother’s advice and fell in love with Hamlet and now their father is dead all because of her. And the pain, and the loss, and the shame, and the guilt, all of this is gnawing away inside this little child’s mind and it comes out as little...songs. (as Ophelia) “And will he not come again? And will he not come again? No. No. He is dead. My father is dead and I killed him.” Okay? Now, let’s try it again, without the Vietnam flashback.
From Dinosaur by Steven Hayet
SPENCER’S bedroom around 7:00pm on a Saturday night. Spencer is talking to Jamie, a friend.
SPENCER: Jamie, I don't want to be eaten by a dinosaur. I was watching a movie last night. And this woman, I don't even think her character has a name – maybe it does, but I don't remember it. She's a personal assistant for some big shot, and her whole job that day is just to watch the big shot’s two kid nephews as they walk around an amusement park. Boom. Out of nowhere she gets eaten by a dinosaur. (beat). OK, she first gets carried around by a dinosaur before being eaten by a different dinosaur but still, I don't want that to happen to me. (beat) This person was just like us. A normal young professional. She got out of bed that morning and went to her job. For all we know, she worked this job to pay the bills so she could pursue her true passion: creating papier-mâché sculptures of corgis or whatever she loved to do. But this woman is dead, and her mother is getting a call from a Jurassic World attorney letting her know that she was eaten by a genetically engineered T-Rex. My mother has sacrificed so much. She is not going to get that phone call because of me.
From The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel by Amy Sherman-Palladino
Standing on the stage in Carnegie Hall, Lenny Bruce, comedian, is trying to convince his comic friend, Midge, that she needs to take every job that comes along.
LENNY: (Pointing to the seats in Carnegie Hall) This is what I want. This is what I’ve worked for. Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to be here? Don’t you want to know a thousand mental patients braved a snowstorm to see you? That should be the goal! Go get a gig and another and another. (beat) Listen to me. I have made a lot of mistakes and I’m gonna keep on making a lot of mistakes but one thing is crystal clear in my mind and it’s what the end-game is. Ninety percent of this game is how they see you. They see you hanging with Tony Bennett, they think you deserve to be there. They see you hauled off to jail for saying something blue at a strip club, they think you deserve that also. Wise up. Don’t plan. Work. Just work, and keep working. There is a moment in this business, window’s open. If you miss it, it closes. Just don’t... If you blow this, Midge. I swear — (he begins to leave then turns back) You will break my heart.
From Proof by David Auburn
CATHERINE, daughter of a very recently deceased mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia, explains what life was like with her father in his final few years, when it was just the two of them in the house together.
CATHERINE: I lived with him! I spent my life with him. I fed him. Talked to him. Tried to listen when he talked. Talked to people who weren’t there... Watched him shuffling around like a ghost. A very smelly ghost. He was filthy. I had to make sure he bathed. My own father. (Beat). After my mother died it was just me here. I tried to keep him happy no matter what idiotic project he was doing. He used to read all day. He kept demanding more and more books. I took them out of the library by the carload. We had hundreds upstairs. Then I realized he wasn’t reading: He believed aliens were sending him messages through the dewey decimal numbers on the library books. He was trying to work out the code...
I mean it was nuts, OK? Later the writing phase: scribbling nineteen, twenty hours a day...I ordered him a case of notebooks and he used every one. I dropped out of school... I’m glad he’s dead.