If someone asked me what is the worst thing about being an actor, and assuming I couldn’t answer anything like “you don’t make a living” or “there’s not enough work” or “you get tired of the audition couches after a while, you know?” then I’d have to say that it’s finding a good monologue for auditions.
I hate hunting for audition material. It’s so time consuming and tedious and hit and miss. It’s like looking for a needle in a library. I’m always keeping my eye out, whether I’m reading scripts or novels or memoirs, if I come across something that might work as a piece I flag it. The problem is, I don’t come across them often enough. And the ones I do, well, I’m kind of stretching it sometimes to say, yes this has a start and a finish and an arc. Maybe I’m reading the wrong stuff. Maybe it’s me. One would think that a late-30s (on stage, if not in person,) white guy could find a monologue, right? I seem to find pieces for angst ridden 20 year olds and guilt-ridden old sots twenty years my senior. But in between is rarer than it should be.
Well today must be my lucky day. This morning, while sitting at the dining room table eating my oatmeal, I was thumbing through a magazine which included a script. I scanned the pages looking to see if there were any monologues for men. And there it was! A quirky, funny, yet serious, piece with a beginning, middle and end that could be taken out of context and made to stand on its own! And it’s a boy! Er… I mean, an “early 40s” man!
Not only that, but to make it even more fun, it’s not crap. The play itself, is funny and clever, and the characters are well drawn. At least, that’s true in the first half that I read this morning; the first half leading up to my new monologue
I’d say exactly what it is, but I don’t want to share it. I hate nothing more than hearing someone doing my monologue while I’m sitting in the lobby on deck.
The Man In The Yellow Hat Lives Here 