Double - Auditions for Actors - Blog 6 - 23/09/16

This lesson we performed a monologue we learnt off by heart (in my case Pax's monologue from Dreams In Captivity) and one that we'd prepared but not fully learnt (Eddie's monologue from Fading Joy).

When I performed Pax's monologue, I recieved the following notes:

• Slow down - a lot of your lines are difficult to understand because you're speaking to fast
• Good American accent
• Search for a deeper meaning - scraping the surface of your monologue is standard but to perform it convincingly, you need to think what each line means.

I then workshopped my opening line. When performing a monologue, the first thing the audience hear is your opening line and it should grab their attention immediately. If you don't draw the audience in a the beginning, they won't be interested in what you say later.

When working on my opening line, I decided to enter loud and riled up but felt this wasn't very captivative. I then tried pointing at my audience by addressing them as Pax's wife, Livi (the opening line is "You're so scared"). This was somewhat effective but I felt that it came across too aggressive so I went with a sigh before addressing the audience as Livi. I feel the sigh caught the audience's attention immediately so they were fully interested as soon as I spoke my first line.

After this monologue, I went on to perform my Fading Joy monologue. For this monologue, I wanted to play my character as if he were unable to understand his scenario. The scenario is Eddie and Joy are stuck on a beach island and Eddie is trying to figure out why they were both there. After every theory he comes up with, he dismisses it and comes up with something totally opposite.

After performing it once, I felt that his inability to understand could be through some sort of special need (this is never specified in the play) so I decided to play the character as if he were slightly disabled but not to the point of where it looks too forced; I wanted to bring the innocence to my character rather than the cliché.

After performing it like this, I felt like it worked so much better and I got quite a few laughs from the audience. 

Next lesson we will have another monologue learnt off by heart (I will use Eddie's monologue from Fading Joy in this scenario) and another monologue prepared.