How'd They Do It? 2021 Hear Me Out Winning Writers Share Their Secrets: Patrick Mulcahey

Over the next few weeks 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:

Patrick Mulcahey, author of Ecce Mom (winner of the Silver Ear for long form monologues)

Here's what Patrick had to say about the 2021 Festival Theme: Borders.

For at least twenty years I’ve been carrying around a character and a story I didn’t know how to tell. A close friend who’s a physician told me about a patient of his (anonymous, of course) whose life ended in tragedy, and tragically alone, because her children refused to believe the illness she complained of was anything but a cover for alcoholism. Since then I entertained the vague notion I’d write something about her someday — which became the day Roland announced the theme of the next Hear Me Out Monologue contest would be “Borders.” 

 

Why did that bring the character into focus for me? I’m not sure I can explain it even to my own satisfaction. Yes, “Borders” as a theme had some political currency at the time, but I wasn’t thinking politically. In my own life I’ve always had an awareness of the boundaries we draw between each other, even — or especially — in our closest, most intimate, most enduring relationships. And when we make a conscious decision to breach those boundaries, those borders, we do so because we want to accomplish something: revelation, persuasion, a provocation to a response which may or may not be the response we want. What else is drama is made of?

 

I struggled with the writing at first. In the real-life story told to me, the woman didn’t conceal her illness from her grown children: they just didn’t believe her. I had no room for them and no way to explain their skepticism; maybe the reason I never could write it in another form was the prospect of creating a character group with no function but to be wrong.

 

So I invented another boundary, a full and fully concealed intimacy in which the character’s diagnosis was understood and appropriate measures taken. Which became another loss, another secret to tell, another border to cross. 

Watch Mulcahey's winning monologue as performed by Alley Mills at the 2021 Hear Me Out Labor Day Festival & Awards Ceremony. 

 

Submissions to this year's competition are now open. Read the 2022 Call for Entries and submit by the Early Bird Deadline of June 15, 2022 to be eligible for all prizes. To be sure you don't miss this and other opportunities, join the Roland Tec Inner Circle here.