How to Shorten a Monologue

Video Transcript

"Good day, I'm Dr. Charles Grimes, and I'm speaking today on behalf of Expert Village about finding a theatrical monologue for use in auditions. A very practical consideration for you as an actor is cutting your monologues down to size. You have to take the monologue as you find it in the text and make sure it fits into a one or a two or very rarely, a three minute slot. You really can't go over. Many auditions will ask simply for a one minute audition, a one minute monologue. You'll have to edit and figure out how you're going to take this bunch of text and put it into one or two minutes. Always go a little bit shorter rather than longer. If you have a one minute monologue and you go one ten or one fifteen, most likely you'll be disqualified from getting the part, and a director may well say, stop and leave the stage. Which you find to be very disappointing. So if necessary, go a little bit shorter rather than longer, and go fifty or fifty-five seconds, just to make sure you don't remove yourself from consideration in the beginning before you've even a chance to really be seen. If you need to cut, look first at the middle of the monologue rather than at the beginning or the end. Keep them as they are, and try to simply cut quicker to the final gist of the monologue--the thing that tells us whether the character gets what he or she wants or doesn't get what he or she wants. Eventually, by the way, you should have about five or six monologues ready to perform, so that you really need to make sure that you have a one minute monologue, a few more one minute monologues, maybe one or two, two minute monologues for you to perform."