EXTRA CRITICUM

Borders: The 2021 Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition Theme

Borders. 

In the early days of the pandemic, there were calls for barring flights to the U.S. from China. My sister was in Poland when Donald Trump suddenly announced an impending ban on incoming flights from Europe. She hastily scrambled to adjust her itinerary and was home in Massachusetts within a week. 

It didn't take long for us to understand that travel bans be damned, the horse that was CoViD19 had long since left the barn and locking the barn doors now was a pointless exercise in willful blindness. It soon dawned on much of humanity that regardless for our relative comfort or antagonism toward the idea, we were somehow finally going to be forced to accept the degree to which the human race is itself a single organism. We are all interconnected. Gangrene in any corner must not be ignored.

3 weeks til deadline! How to best use this time to submit a winning monologue to Hear Me Out 2021?

June is ending. And you haven't figured out what to submit to this year's Hear Me Out Monologue Competition?

Don't panic. Sure, you only have about three weeks til the July 22 deadline, but if you break it down, you have more than enough time to conceive of, write and submit a winning response to this year's festival theme: Borders.

Here's my two cents on how I'd go about this if I were hoping to submit.

1. Write something new specifically tailored to the guidelines of the competition. 

As you consider the calendar, it may be tempting to go digging into your files in search of an existing monologue from some older work that might fit the various judging criteria outlined in the Call for Entries. 

The impulse is understandable. I admit to having wrestled with similar notions myself when hoping to enter a potentially lucrative competition with thousands of dollars in prize money at stake. The submission of a tried and true piece, perhaps one even pulled from a successful full-length play may be a kind of comfort a de-stresser. And of course, it requires less of you. Less time. Less thought. Less work. 

Here's why I suggest you avoid this path.

4 new videos welcome folks to Roland Tec dot com.

Just gave the home page at Roland Tec dot com a bit of a refresher. Check out these videos.

What does theatre need most in this moment? Ken Levine says "comedy." But I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

My friend Robert Sullivan shared this morning's post on Ken Levine's popular blog. In it, he puts forth an idea I've heard before. When times are tough after an economic upheaval, what theatre need now more than ever is: comedy. Comedy, the argument goes, is our ticket to escape, to take our minds off what we've been through and what may lie ahead in a not-so-certain economic recovery post-pandemic.

We heard similar calls for comedy above all else in the period of uncertainty immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001. 

It's understandable why some might think this would be the trick. But I have a different idea.

In those moments when the house lights go down and the curtain goes up, everyone in the audience begins putting their own life worries (of the day and of the year) on a shelf and turning their attention, instead, to the lives of the characters on stage. This is what we have come to do. To set aside our own concerns and for the duration of the play, focus our attention—with head and heart—on the lives of others.

What keeps us on the edge of our seats?

What is a hit? Every writer wants one. But ask anyone to define the term and you're likely to get a confused salad of mixed vague impressions. The definition of a hit in the worlds of theatre and film it seems is even more difficult to pin down. Of course we know what it means at the Box Office. But I'm asking a different question. How the devil we get from here to there.

There's one thing I know for sure. You can't have a hit without intense audience hunger for your story.

When your audience is sitting on the edge of their seats, hanging on every beat, your show is a lot closer to a hit than a bomb.

Think about it.

How many films have you watched start to finish with a full bladder? When you find yourself running as fast as humanly possible to and from the restroom during a film or before the Act break of a play or musical it's because you don't want to miss a beat.

What sort of entertainment inspires this sort of behavior? How is it that every now and then you find yourself sitting there in that darkened theatre unwilling or unable to tear yourself away, even for a brief minute?

Of the 5 writers featured on tonight's lineup, 2 just changed titles. Find out why.

Titles are so important. The title of your play acts as a frame, encouraging the audience to discover connections they might otherwise miss. 

In the weeks leading up to each month's Some1Speaking presentation, I meet privately with each playwright to confirm my suspicions as to what lies at the heart of their monologue.

Next our Resident Director, Suzanne Bachner, meets with the artists for one exploratory rehearsal. In this way Hear Me Out Monologues has constructed a pipeline aimed at bringing new character studies to life and in so doing, introducing writers to new audiences by placing the objectives of the writers front and center in everything we do.

This month, something interesting happened.

Of the 5 monologues being presented tonight, 2 have completely changed titles just in the past week as each author came to recognize that the title they'd originally chosen was in some way failing to properly frame the piece they'd written.

The frame suggests ways of interpreting the work of art. So in this way, the title whispers in my ear as the house lights go down. Here are 3 examples: