Monologue Mania

I always thought monologues were an odd form of theatre, mostly because it doesn't seem very natural. It seems like the form would lend itself to a naturalistic setting - natural speech patterns, good opportunity for distinct voices, room to develop a strong character - but who on EARTH would pour out their inner soul to a room full of strangers? Makes no sense to me.

Hamlet does this all the freakin' time. Pretty much everyone in Shakespeare does. But that's a completely different style of theatre than what us naturalistic-loving Americans are used to. In an Arthur Miller play, you're not likely to see the main character break away from the action and discuss his inner turmoil with the audience.

But even in naturalistic theatre, monologues serve their purpose. Connor McPherson's The Weir is made up almost entirely of monologues, but it still maintains the fourth wall. That play showed me how monologues can be really effective for storytelling. It's really distracting when a character is trying to tell a story, but other characters are always interrupting to remind the audience that they are active listeners.

But New Orleans Monologues, The Laramie Project, and Vagina Monologues are different. They understand that they're monologues, and they embrace it. (I mean, two of them have the word "monologue" in their title - doesn't get much more obvious than that.) I thought it was interesting how you can still drive narrative without actually showing the audience the action. A lot of it is storytelling techniques; how to make the narrative interesting in monologue form. One thing NOM was good at, I thought, was telling the story in past tense, but making it feel like the story is taking place now. Both NOM and LP were telling stories that the audience already knew the outcomes to, but because they were personalized accounts, the audience didn't know how the stories would end for those particular characters.

Another thing that I need to bear in mind with monologues is what LP does really well - telling several sides to the same story at the same time. So when Reggie Fluty is describing how she found Matthew Shepard, Dr. Cantway is telling his story of when he first saw Matthew. Not only does it break up the monologues (which is easier on the actor and the audience), it provides a suspense, almost, drawing out the conclusion a little longer and making the audience wait just a tad bit more for the resolution to that particular account.

The Vagina Monologues is the only one of the three that I'd never read or seen or been in before. To me, women standing around telling stories about their vaginas is a bit odd. Kinda weirds me out, I'm not gonna lie. But in the select few monologues we read there were some very distinct voices.

My playwriting class I took last semester was frustrating in some ways, partly because we started out with monologues, but they were all too "prosey" for my prof. She wanted them to be more immediate (still not entirely sure what that means, because it's hard to right a monologue in the past tense but keep it immediate), and she said mine was more like a short story told in the first person than a monologue. I still don't really know how to fix that, but after reading some of those selected monologues, I think one thing I can work on is voice. This will make any monologue I write more textured, even if it isn't "immediate." Maybe immediacy will come in time. How ironic is that?

KG