So, if you read this blog much you know that since the dawn of this pandemic I've been on a kind of OCD Mission Impossible to encourage playwrights and screenwriters--really anyone who writes scripts, who tells stories this way--to give monologue a closer look because, well... as the pandemic shutdown demonstrated so well, when the expensive and time-consuming elements associated with productions disappear and the community at large finds itself communicating via Zoom, the unique work of the playwright becomes more essential than ever.
No lights. No sets. No costumes. No stage. Yet still feels like theatre. How come?
If people are waiting for something akin to theatre (as we once knew it) to find them and move them through the Zoom box, then who is more equipped to provide this than the playwright?
After all it's the playwright who engineers our catharsis. If I am pummeled to my core at the final curtain that's because the playwright wanted it. It's the playwright who understands, perhaps more keenly and more viscerally than any of us, the bond between life as we live it and life as we wish it to be. Our refusal to acknowledge that there might be a difference between these two things has been selling theatre tickets since man discovered fire and gathered everyone around to talk about it.
The Festival of Playwrights Making Lemonade from Lemons
This Labor Day marked the one-year anniversary of Hear Me Out Monologues, which produces the Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition & Labor Day Fest. 400 entries from around the world were read and evaluated by a
A Good Story is Never Enough.
Of the more than 400 entries we receive each year, at least 30% of submissions are really not monologues at all but read more like short stories than anything else. And it never ceases to surprise me the number of people who seeing a call for monologues still just reach into their pile of manuscripts to pull out a good story and hit SUBMIT.
And what inevitably follows is we receive dozens and dozens of evaluations from judges that offer some version of this:
Gorgeous writing and moving story. I was drawn in right away. This writer really has something important to say. But this is not a monologue, it's basically a short story.
And so the entry goes right into the NO pile. IMMEDIATE DISQUALIFICATION.
The greatest achievement a playwright can have is to get out of the way of her characters' intentions. When the writer disappears behind the story being told, the play is alive. Hence the title of this post.
In the early days of television, each program was sponsored by a corporate entity, usually that had some product to promote. At various well-placed moments of tension in the story, a 30-second commercial interruption was always introduced with the same eight-word phrase: And Now for a Word from Our Sponsor.
This was the opportunity for the money behind the show to remind the viewer that when all is said and done, the most important thing to remember is: buy our product.
In many ways, in the context of a full-length, the impatient or anxious playwright might be tempted to insert himself into the proceedings just to be sure we're focusing where we ought to be. In a medium which derives its power from the illusion that there is no writer, that in fact the characters on stage are real people fighting through real life conflict, the pseudo-monologue (as I like to call it) can be the kiss of death.
Interrupt your story, take focus away from the characters you've worked so hard to construct as living breathing individuals, and watch the audience's investment in the entire enterprise evaporate in a matter of minutes.
So in that sense, no, you don't own that monologue. It's not your turn to have your say. The monologue only has any business being a part of your script if it's there to serve the whims and agendas of the person out of whose mouth it's coming.
Dialogue is Action.
Any work we do in my October Advanced Monologue Weekend will be based in this core truth. Characters in your play speak in service of intention. Until you get out from in between your characters and their intentions, your plays will feel dead inside and no one will give a damn no matter how clever, perceptive you are and no matter how gorgeous your prose.
Advanced Monologue Weekend is the perfect jump-start to a newly focused and productive season when theatre as we once knew it may or may not return to full capacity. While we cannot know for certain what lies ahead for the art form and its audience, the simplest most consistently reliable form of theatre there is, the one that most lends itself to transfer back and forth between IRL and a la Zoom is the play composed of one person talking.
It's a play and not a story as long as we in the audience believe it's a person talking rather than a writer writing.
Take your characters and their struggles directly to the audience you know will want to get to know them. Become a master of monologue and in turn a master of your artistic destiny.
Advanced Monologue Weekend is offered three times a year (October, December and March) and is designed to be taken repeatedly whenever you're feeling like you could use a little craft refresher. It's just one of several workshops conceived and created by Roland Tec. Visit RolandTec.com for more info.
