Monologue

Monologue is a six-class, six-week course dedicated to preparing our second year students’ audition monologues. For many years of an actor’s early professional career, monologues represent an important part of the audition process. Many beginning actors lack a sufficient resume, or don’t possess the film & TV credits that would allow an agent, manager, casting director or director to get a sense of an actor’s work. Monologues then, are the actor’s calling card.

There are many important factors an actor must consider when compiling an arsenal of monologues for auditions: choosing well-written, contemporary material from all three mediums (film, television, and theater), cutting and editing while also maintaining the clarity of a beginning, middle and end, locating contrasting material, and then most importantly crafting these pieces in order to create interesting, vivid behavior. This takes skill.

Monologues are tricky because the actor actually has no one to work off of. The performance then, is entirely within the actors control. Most untrained actor’s simply stand on a spot and say lines as if they are reading from a teleprompter. They look incredibly amateurish and do not come off as capable of handling professional work. This class challenges our second year students to bring what they are learning in acting class and applying that to the monologue. How does an actor craft a personal previous circumstance and a vivid acting relationship? How do you create the reality of actually speaking to someone who has no lines? How does an actor craft in a way that allows an interesting journey from beginning to end? How do you create the spontaneity of thought? How do you implant self-discovery? How do you choose material that will actually showcase who you are and your range? How do you implant this homework so that your monologues can be done anytime, anywhere, from open calls, to an agent’s office? These are all important questions.

We spend months before class begins in the spring to help our students not only find material, but choose from the dozens of possibilities, to settle on the pieces that best suit each individual student. Our reputation as the best training program in the United States is based in large part with how well our students audition professionally. This class gives our graduates a tremendous leg up on their competition, and gives them the opportunity to make an excellent first impressions.

Monologue class is a requirement for Business I and Business II.