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:
Jeff Dunne, author of "A Change in Nature" (2020 Hear Me Out Finalist Winner)
When seeing the prompt of “Me & My Masks”, I was immediately reminded of a monologue that I’d written a while back called A Change In Nature. The piece centers on a raccoon as the archetype for a masked bandit of selfish, but not ill-intending, nature. It plays with the realities of how we often give in to our base urges despite recognizing that they often lead to poor choices, and how we then later justify those behaviors – to ourselves (by painting them as needs) and to others (often by trying to shift the blame away from ourselves).
What I thought made this a really good fit for this competition was the multiple levels that the piece played with the idea of masks. Not only are we talking about masks that attempt to misrepresent us to the rest of the world, but also the masks we employ to hide from ourselves. The incremental reveal that the speaker is a raccoon is a metaphor for how a mask of the former kind is slowly discarded, but what I thought made it a particularly great match for the prompt is the monologue’s ending, where the raccoon finally and quickly sheds that latter type of mask, abandoning the façade that he’s transcended into a more responsible, enlightened mammal and accepting that all he really wants out of life is more food.
I’d go into more detail, but my pizza just arrived. Sorry. Gotta go. Bye.
This year's Hear Me Out Monologue Competition theme is: Borders. Deadline: July 22 at Noon, EDT.