Over the next few days several of last year's Finalist Winners will share their process of getting from the festival prompt to a monologue they felt excited to submit to Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.
Today, we hear from:
Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro author of "Torched" (2020 Hear Me Out Finalist Winner)
When I first saw your call for submissions, I instantly was inspired to revise “Torched,” which had been in a reading by the Asian American Theater Artists of Boston as part of my evening of five monologues, “Amazingly Annoying Women.” The theme of masks is critical to a play about a multicultural dean who at first seems to be delivering a run-of- the-mill speech commemorating the performance artist Kathleen Change, who died by self-immolation. By the end of her speech we realize the dean has come with “props,” a can of gasoline and a match. She removes her dean’s mask and becomes Kathleen, the tortured political activist who torched herself on the same spot 23 years before.
I learned so much from hearing the other monologues on “Me & My Masks” that I instantly started a radical rewrite of another of my plays from “Amazingly Annoying Women.” You had kindly suggested that I might in the future submit another monologue for consideration for Some1Speaking (which I enjoyed very much the other night).
