Techniques for Rehearsing Monologues

Video Transcript

"This is Dr. Charles Grimes, and I'm talking on behalf of Expert Village about rehearsing a monologue. You may be asking yourself as you're doing what seems like an extraordinary amount of work on one fairly small speech. When have I rehearsed this enough? Let me try to convince you the real answer is never. When you're acting, when you're looking at a monologue and trying to make it work, it can always become better. There's always the potential for improvement. Think about it from a cost benefit analysis. If you can put a little more work in or a lot more work in, it may make that monologue just good enough to distinguish you from other people. Furthermore, the process that we've been talking about, analyzing your character, rehearsing your monologue, communicating to another person, all that is a continuous process. It goes on, it's about making discoveries. It's about always coming up with something new. Again, if you're doing a really good monologue, it has layers, it has subtleties, it has shifts. None of these may be apparent on the first reading, or a second reading, or a fortieth reading or a fiftieth reading. So if you're wondering how long you should rehearse, the answer is, keep on doing it. Keep making it happen, and as you do this, you will get better and better, at some point along the line, and be able to show yourself as someone who is that much better than the other people out there auditioning."