Rehearsing Monologues in Your Own Words

Video Transcript

"This is Dr. Charles Grimes, and I'm talking on behalf of Expert Village about rehearsing a monologue. One technique that you might want to use for rehearsing your monologue is to extend the as if or the given circumstances exercise that we just talked about and think about scripting for yourself a speech that might follow and somehow parallel what you're doing in this script. Put yourself in a situation similar to the character where you are doing what the character is trying to do. You can improvise this or you can write it down. Let's give Hank a shot at improvising this. I haven't told him about this, he's just going to give it a total shot in the dark. He's going to look at me and try to think about I need correction somehow or someone in his life needs correction. And he's going to try to do that right now and see what comes up out of this. Listen, McCann, we've done this thing a thousand times before, right? I know you're good at this, you're good at this. Remember last time? Am I? The last time we did this? You're fantastic. Oh. Thank you. You're fantastic at this friend. Oh. Certain elements of this might well approximate points and procedures to what you've already done. You understand that, right? I've done it when? When have I done it? You've done it two years ago, remember? That's the last time we saw each other. Yes. You were fantastic then, right? Fantastic. I don't think fantastic was the word. Did you see that guy afterwards? He was destroyed, he was perfect. Yes. You're perfect at what you do. Yeah. You just lack self confidence, come on. You're good, you're a strong guy. Okay, so I think that Hank, and what Hank actually had to do was to make me feel somewhat better about myself. I put up some resistance, just so it wasn't so easy for him, and I forced him to reach out to me and make me feel a little bit better. We threw away the words of the script, just for the heck of it, so that we got more in touch with specific actions that are actually in those words. Again, you can play around. It's not about the words, well it is, but it's really about the actions. So that's one way that you can play around with your own words and use improvisation to get at the essence of your monologue."