Cutting monologues for Auditions
Today we worked on cutting monologues for auditions! A typical audition requires a 1 minute monologue. The typical monologue that you find online or in a book is 2-5 minutes long - so it requires some strategic cutting so that the actor can:
1. Tell a coherent story
2. Show and make at least a few awesome character choices
3. Show dynamics and range in the writing and actions
4. Use every second on stage to help them get cast
In order to do this, we go through our monologue and prioritise our lines starting with those least important to the objectives above. Any line that doesn't fit - we cut out immediately. From there, we go through each line, map out what actions we could use, how they contribute to showing our awesome acting skills, and we prioritise again. The funniest lines (or those that have the potential for the biggest actions or character shifts) stay - the rest we sort through until we have our next batch of least funny, the ones with the least potential for funny action or helping add something that we could use to our advantage - we cut.
By the end of our process, we have a monologue where every single line contributes in a significant way to us getting the part - and every word matters.
Mapping out monologues for auditions
Because we now have a cut monologue where every single line matters - we now have to map out our monologue with actions and voice inflection that will make each line funnier, more dramatic, or more significant.
We do this by first circling the words we want to emphasise - and come up with 1 big action per line that will help us show a significant character development choice. From there, we fill in the rest of our lines with transition actions that lead into our big-funny moments.
Ella did so awesome!!