Dramatic monologue - finding a stage ready serious character
Today we worked on a whole new section of acting - Dramatic scene work. When doing a dramatic monologue (serious monologue), it is important to make the scene or monologue natural - while still scaling it to a theatrical stage. Finding this balance is hard because big actions if played in the wrong way can seem like failed comedic actions instead of adding to the targeted intended emotion of the scene. With comedic monologues - building characters that can use comedic timing and big actions to add to the comedic timing are more easily scaled to a theatrical level.
In order to get into character and to make our big actions make sense - we started off by adding secondary things to the monologue itself to add to our character development.
Some of the things we added were:
1. Doesn't want people to see her cry - yet she's on the verge of tears the whole time
2. Feisty and defensive- turning her sadness into anger
3. Feeling like she's hyperventilating the whole scene
By adding these things, we can create reasons for sarcasm, outbursts, and additional emotions other than just "sad" or "serious monologue".
Using all of these things we create a more interesting and dynamic character so that we can then take everything we've learned about a comedic scene (acting in the beats, pacing the scene, acting as if it were a scene rather than a monologue complete with reactions to tell more about the character) and put it into our dramatic scene or monologue.