All this month, we are exploring some essential questions to ask your character when preparing for a monologue audition. Join me this spring to explore monologue prep in more depth at the Acting Foundations and Acting Essentials Workshops. Find your next best monologue at the Actors’ Script Circle. Register today! Space is limited and registration closes two weeks prior to the date of the workshop.
To begin preparing a monologue, ask yourself some essential questions about the character and where they are in their journey.
The first big question to tackle is, “What do I want?” To be clear, this is what the character wants, but it is helpful to phrase the characters motivations in the first person, I/me/we.
Sometimes this is quite easy to figure out, the character might actually ask for something in the monologue. Other times, it requires digging a little deeper.
If the character asks for something, probe whether this is what the character really wants from this conversation. Let’s take a very basic example: the character is babysitting a tired and cranky toddler. The character says,
“All I want is for you to take this one bite of peas. If you eat one bite of peas, I will let you have a scoop of ice cream – and I won’t tell your mother I gave you ice cream with double chocolate syrup.”
Ostensibly, the babysitter wants the toddler to take a bite of peas. It’s right there in the text. But notice the babysitter also makes the bargain about ice cream. Then you might ask, do I (the babysitter) really want the toddler to eat peas, or do I want the toddler to finish dinner so I can put them to bed and binge watch Netflix until the parents get home? Or maybe all I want is peace and quiet and I know I’ll get 10 minutes of that if this kid has ice cream. Yes, I want the toddler to eat peas, but the reason I want the toddler to eat peas is the more important “want” in this situation.
Other times, it may be tough to figure out what a character wants. Then, you may have to do a little more digging into what happened before this scene to understand what the character wants and why they want it.
Answering “What do I want?” is the first essential question to tackle when preparing a monologue.
Do you want help learning how to prepare a monologue? Check out my upcoming workshops for high school actors to prepare for monologue auditions.