How to Improve Your 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. We're here to talk about knowing your strengths as an actor and trying to having a bunch of good monologues of all the kinds of monologues that are out there. As far as your strengths as an actor, you need to ask other people what kind of roles you've been good at, and you need them to be honest with you. You need to find something that's going to show you off in the best possible light. Ask your directors, ask your close friends who can be honest with you, in what kind of stuff you appeared the best. Also, learn a little bit about the different ways that monologues can be classified so that you have a whole bunch of different kinds of monologues at your disposal. Someone may ask you for a classical monologue. Sometimes this means from the era of Shakespeare or before. It might mean from the 18th century or before. You can play with that. If someone uses the term, you can politely ask them what they mean so that you give them what they want. You want to have at least one or two modern monologues at your disposal from a play after 1900, and pick a comic one and pick a more serious one belonging to the realm of tragedy or the genre of comedy. You also probably want to pick one speech that is a soliloquy, which is a subset of the monologue, and we've all heard the word soliloquy from high school and it simply means a character is on stage talking to himself. What this means for you as an actor is that you are on stage trying to figure out a problem or an issue in you life and talking it through in your own head and coming up with some decision or some partial solution, or failing to do so by the end of the monologue. So these are some basic terms that you should know, in terms of knowing your strengths as an actor and finding the right monologue, the right monologues for you to do as an actor."