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:
Lillian Ann Slugocki author of “Angelica on the Balcony” (2020 Hear Me Out Finalist Winner)
I wrote most of “Angelica on the Balcony” at a hotel, Extended Stay America, in late July-- next to a highway and a Dunkin Donuts. I had a small studio with a kitchenette, and all the doors opened the wrong way. I had an editing job, remote. I sat at a strange little desk and did my work. At 4:00 p.m., I closed the plastic blackout curtains, made a cup of coffee, and wrote. I saw her outside, with the backdrop of a gray sky. It’s cold-- masks are clipped to the railing on her balcony.
I knew I wanted to write this the second I saw the call for monologues on social media. I thought the theme of masks, especially now, was trenchant, but also provocative because the mouth is my favorite part of the body. And I also wanted to write about cutting up the last of my late brother’s t-shirts to make three or four of them, and the whole elaborate routine of washing them and drying them.
It was crazy, and obsessive, and beautiful, and I wanted to memorialize that-- within the larger context. So, Angelica is me but bigger. I heard her voice as if we catch her in the middle of a story, already in progress.
And I was also very curious about what felt like a new hybrid form. It’s the actor, the text, a single voice, performed live-- but the audience will see it as a kind of movie-- because it’s a digital space. And I was so intrigued by that, and really loved it. Years ago, I wrote The Erotica Project, with Erin Cressida Wilson, and knew how much freedom there is -- with a single voice. The night of the performance, when the actor, Kate Weiman appears, on a balcony, in the digital space, as Angelica-- she’s self-possessed and funny, yes, but also so damn human. And that was the most amazing alchemy.
