Outrageous - Drama Monologue

O U T R A G E O U S

You say you have to lay people off. That’s terrible, and you look awful. You're really getting yourself worked up about it, huh?

It’s never easy to ruin someone’s life, is it?

Don’t look at me like that! You just stood here for an hour, and told me your sob story, then you stood here for another hour, and told two other managers about it. You stood here talking, and the guy you’re about to lay off is actually doing work. In the time it took you to stand here and bitch, I could have paid that guy for three hours of work. Maybe we should lay you off? Maybe we should take your pay check?

The hypocrisy is staggering. You stand here with your fake sadness. That puppy dog look. Meanwhile there is some guy working his ass off in the heat that is about to be told to gather his things, because today is his last day.

You come up to me, you tell me about your troubles. You tell me how this affects the departments. How it has put you in a terrible mood. How if we keep firing people, we can never train them right. Everything you say is about the bottom line, and in the same breath you curse the bottom line as if it has nothing to do with you.

What about them? What about their lives? What does this do to the morale of our employees to see people culled like cattle? What does it do to a family to hear their breadwinner was laid off?

But yeah, I hope you survive this terrible crisis. Now go do your fucking job.

Goodbye - Drama Monologue

G O O D B Y E

By: Paul William Fassett

The last thing we said was goodbye and this is how things end. With that word so final, so bitter, so acute. Goodbye. Now all we see of each other are snapshot memories, text messages, pictures on facebook but none of it is real.

None of it. Not even our memories.

If I pursue, you'll pull away. You needed this space, this vast empty desert between us that births no life, no plants, no wild things. We're left with sweet untruths. Memories that never happened. Loves that never blossomed. One single night that was supposed to be so much more but never reached it's climax and now we crave it again. To see things through. To claw at each other like hungry flesh craving animals. 

We want to relive the real thing so we can remember what it was really like instead of just romanticizing it.

But goodbye is final. Goodbye is... Farewell. How do you close the distance created by such a word?

Analyzing Monologues and Tips On Performing

I am going to do a different kind of monologue today. This monologue is going to explain my thought process when I write a scene as well as my thought process when I coach an actor to perform it for an audience. 

Let's take a look at a dramatic monologue:

Oh but you are so perfect! You take every opportunity to tell me when I am wrong! You think I can't make decisions on my own! That I'm going to somehow end up on the street without daddy there to tell me how I fucked up.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe you don't have life nailed down the way you think you do? I mean, you know what they say about glass houses right?

You sit there every day, judging me. I come to you for help and all I get are those eyes, probing me. Have you ever looked at yourself? Asked yourself...

What the hell am I doing here? I mean, if the only purpose of life is to keep on living. To wake up in the morning, eat, sleep, repeat, then why do it!

Look. Will you do me a favor? Go out with me today. Just trust me, we’ll just, go for a walk or something. Down at the park. Just you and me. You don’t have to talk to anyone but me and hell. Maybe you’ll get a tan.

What do you say? Will you come?

My thoughts on an effective monologue and an effective performance are kind of one in the same. In order to understand a monologue you must understand the audience and how they will react to a given written word once performed.

I think a common mistake by actors is they see a given monologue and they believe that it is one note. I see good actors give an otherwise boring yet thoroughly convincing performance simply because they do not understand that they are not performing for the camera, but instead, the audience. They do not understand the emotional arc and how to manipulate their audience both physically and emotionally.

Now I know what you may be saying. "No shit Sherlock." You say that, yet you may be thinking this is simpler than it is. "Just act good." Please, it's not that simple.

A monologue is supposed to have an emotional arc, whether that arc be a build up to a fall, or a frantic roller-coaster of emotion with many dips and many highs and devastating lows.

Let's walk through an example real quick:

Anger:

Oh but you are so perfect! You take every opportunity to tell me when I am wrong! You think I can't make decisions on my own! That I'm going to somehow end up on the street without daddy there to tell me how I fucked up. 

Anger is a powerful emotion. It has impact on you, the person you are angry with, as well as the people around you who are not even involved in the conversation. Ask yourself what happens when you yell at someone. What do they do? 

Most back away, reel back. Especially if you catch them off guard. So if you are in the audience, or behind a desk at a casting, and someone makes you reel back, surprised, that's powerful. You make them take notice. You shake them out of the mundane, day to day, one millionth: "I'm so sad, daddy why don't you like me." Monologues they hear every day. 

I'm not going to be so bold as to say they don't see anger but when you can command their attention the whole way through by taking them on an emotional journey, then you have done your job. The next stop on the journey is the calming stage. You are coming down off your anger now, because you realize you aren't mad at him. You feel bad for him, but there is still some anger there and you can't just let go of it totally.

Calming:

Did you ever stop to think that maybe you don't have life nailed down the way you think you do? I mean, you know what they say about glass houses right?

You sit there every day, judging me. I come to you for help and all I get are those eyes, probing me. Have you ever looked at yourself? Asked yourself...

What happens when you whisper? When you speak low. People come forward, they lean in so they can hear what you have to say. You have their attention now only because you started off so explosively. Let's rate our anger on a scale of 1-10. A 1 is slightly irritated. A ten is spitting mad, your face red and crumpled. In the beginning you are at about an 8, a 9 if you are brave but by the time you get to calming, you have slowly brought your anger down to a five. When you get to the end of the calming state, you should be somewhere along the lines of a 3 to a 1.

In transit between these feelings should be a moment of silence. A moment of reflection for your character. Time to think about what you are going to say. 

What this moment really is, is time for you to gather your emotion for the next scene. Whether you use the Meisner technique, or you pull your emotions from an event or person in your past, this is your moment to gather it.

Surprise anger:

What the hell am I doing here? I mean, if the only purpose of life is to keep on living. To wake up in the morning, eat, sleep, repeat, then why do it!

So now that our audience is leaning in to hear what we have to say, we hit them in the face with a 6 maybe a 7 if you can get there on the anger scale again. Once again you have them reeling back emotionally from the onslaught you are hitting them with. Once again, you are slowly bringing all of this anger down to the moment of emotional bareness. Here is the finale. 

So while you are working your way through the anger scale, tears should be being brought forth. In order to do this, your anger must be about something real. Something or someone from your life that you can associate to this. Once the tears start coming , let them flow. Do not try to control it. Sob if you have to. Many people try to control the emotion. Do not. Allow the emotion to control you.

Your goal is emotional bareness.

Sincerity:

I get sad watching you. Sitting there, watching the world pass by in fucking… 

Emotion has you chocked up, tripping over your words. Look for elipses. They are either lapses in the characters train of thought, or they are tripping themselves up.

Sound bites, on the news, while the real world is out there happening every day without you. All this time. All this pain. Just avoiding life.

This is the moment of sincerity of emotion. You have about 10 seconds max to transition from anger, to sadness. Preferably with tears. Sadness is equal to anger in a lot of ways. Anger is an expression of hopelessness at times. The hopelessness in this case of watching someone you love waste away. Wasting the potential of life because they feel they are incapable of doing anything worthwhile.

Every point in this scene should be emphasized. Pauses used to gather thoughts and emotions should be inserted to increase the tension. When you pause between thoughts, what does the audience do? They listen, they lean in. They wait, impatient, for the next word. Use that impatience to increase the tension. The question that this peice asks of the viewer is: Will the characters come to understand and accept each other for their flaws... Well, will they? That depends on you. Depends on how you chose to play the next part.

So, for sake of argument, let's say that while you are angry, the sadness should show through. The voice should be calling out in anger, but the face should show the despair you feel over feeling helpless.

What is the audience doing? If we have taken them on this roller-coaster ride, they should be right there with us, wanting to share in our sadness.

At the end of this scene we have a moment to think once again. To wipe our tears, maybe even laugh at ourselves. Look at the mess we've mad of ourselves. We haven't cried like this since we were kids. You take a deep breath and look at the man, wasting away and say:

Hopeful:

Look. Will you do me a favor? Go out with me today. Just trust me, we’ll just, go for a walk or something. Down at the park. Just you and me. You don’t have to talk to anyone but me and hell. Maybe you’ll get a tan.

What do you say? Will you come?

You have just taken your audience on a journey. Led them through a story that has an end. A complete three act within just a snippet of time. They still have questions. What did the father say? Did they go for their walk? Did they come to understand each other?

These questions are good, it shows they were paying attention.

So what is essential to a good performance? A knowledge of how the audience will react when confronted by a particular sound, volume, or emotional cue. How do you sharpen this knowledge?

That will be a topic for next time.

I hope you enjoyed this entry and that this helped open your mind a little.

The Erosion Of A Man - Drama Monologue

T H E   E R O S I O N   O F   A   M A N

BY Paul William Fassett

You call me weak. Maybe you're right. You all think there's something wrong with me. You always have. Maybe you're right. Even as a kid. Let me finish. Even when I was little. 

I said let me finish!

You fucking people... You women wear men down. Chip away at us like a river through a fucking canyon and it's not enough that I'm worn away to dust, you keep taking and taking and you make it look like it's my duty to give. 

It started with mom. She did a number on me. That evil bitch of a teacher I had when I was in fourth grade. You remember her? Mom swallowed every stupid thing that woman said about me. She said that she thought I was disabled. She meant retarded. Mom came home and told you three and that was my new nickname. Retard.

Laugh. Go ahead and laugh. It's funny. I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me. I always second guessed myself. Looked to you and Mom for approval and here I am, still begging for it.

I'm glad she died and don't give me that: "She's your mother." bullshit. An asshole is an asshole, regardless of title.

Remember my Kung Fu teacher? The one with the toupee? Mom made me take a martial art because she was tired of me getting picked on. You remember how you used to fuck with me Sherry? You remember how you would pretend to be sparring with me when I would get home, slap box me and shit. Knock me fucking silly. Embarrass me.

Well we were at the dojo and everyone had left so me and Sifu worked together on my forms because I had a belt test coming. Mom called and asked: "You ready to go?" I thought for a minute. Do I want to go home? Because Sherry is going to start beating on me, Mom is going to lecture me about reading more and the rest of you are just going to gouge away, so I said fuck it. I'll stay.

We worked on my forms, and he stepped down on my thigh so I would get deeper into a horse stance and when I couldn't get any lower he would grab the muscle and say: "Flex." but he didn't need to tell me to flex because I was already tense. Everytime he'd grab me my body would seize up. Soon I relaxed and he relaxed and when he asked me to pull my pants down so he could look at my legs, I didn't think anything of it. When he asked me to take off my underwear, I knew something was wrong but he was strong and I was weak so I didn't disobey. I kept thinking: "Stop thinking so much. This is some kind of test, just go with it."

Before I knew it I was lying on my stomach, trying not to cry, clinching my teeth, imagining I was somewhere warm, that the stabs of pain were an ocean wave washing over my back, that my tears were just spray from the ocean bubbles popping on my face. I learned that night that if you concentrate hard enough you can create pressure in your ears and the world sounds like the ocean, so I concentrated and his grunts went into a tunnel and it was like I was being tossed around inside a wave, unable to breath, suffocating, every tiny breath of air making me more aware of the pain.

I passed out at some point and I just remember being in the car, a gentle reminder and a hand on my knee telling me that no one could know what happened. I bled. I bled for days and you made fun of me for being in the bathroom so long. Said I was jerking off. You had no idea because you never looked! You never asked. You didn't care...

All the guys in my class used to joke about Sifu. They knew what he used to do to other kids. They thought it was funny. Something to joke about in the locker room. I read in the newspaper they arrested him recently and I cried. I cried for an hour, sitting on the floor, clutching the paper, all the while feeling guilty for feeling like that. Because who was I to cry? I let him do it! 

Some kid spoke out, against all of his better instincts, against all his fears of ridicule and now the bastard is in jail.

I keep thinking to myself, why didn't I tell you, tell mom? If I told someone, they would have stopped him. Put him away. I let him get away with it, so all those kids he raped, I helped him get away with it by being silent. I was complicit.

You helped him too, by eroding me to an emotional nub, you are just as guilty as I am.

Hope - Drama Monologue

As per a request from yesterday's blog entry.

H O P E

BY: Paul William Fassett

We were standing at the train station, waiting, hoping we could get out of the city. Honduras was a war zone. Gangs fighting for their own stretch of land that was never theirs to begin with. We were like chattel to them to be bought and sold and slaughtered. We had been there for weeks waiting for a chance to board but we never got on a train. There were much more desperate people willing to fight harder for what they wanted. We knew that if we did not get out that night, the gangs would be back to collect their daily tribute and we would be coming up short. Our daughter was only twelve at the time.

To the Mara, however, she was old enough.

We waited at the boarding platform and were the first to enter when the doors opened but a line had formed that snaked around the building and off into the thicket of palm trees and fronds behind us. We were quickly overtaken by a flood of people and soon we found ourselves washed out, our little girl, Lupe in tow behind us. So many people, all of them pushing against one another, jockeying for position at the front of what had become a wall of flesh.

There was no hope. We were so far behind and the people in front of us were young and full of strength and anger and determination and our bodies were old and worked and tired. Resigned as we were to our fate we still decided to wait out the turbulence as people pushed passed us and shook the crowd like a mighty wave but suddenly the sea of bodies parted and a hush fell over the crowd. A middle aged couple, fair haired and pale skinned were escorted by armed guards as a path opened to the train.

The two of them were massive compared to the crowd. Round bellies, apprehensive faces drawn long from the despairing faces of the thicket of dark skinned stick figures. We were a group of skeletons watching the living pass by. Something dropped from his pockets in front of Lupe and before I could grab her, she was off running for the couple. Armed guards spun on her pointing their rifles at the child. My wife was not far behind her, holding her, putting out her hand begging.

The man spoke with a heavy accent and helped lower the men's rifles with a gentle hand. “Vat is it little girl?”

Lupe extended her hand and in her palm was a gold watch attached to a silver chain. He took it gently from her hand as I came to stand behind her. I apologized profusely, looking down at my feet all the while. The German's were probably diplomats on vacation, I thought. Why they would chose a place like this, however, was beyond me.

He knelt down and said: “Sank you. Ziss vas my father's and my father's before him. It is dear to me.” He was silent for a moment and his mind seemed to be elsewhere. “Vat is your name?”

Lupe, she replied. He stood and turned to his wife and exchanged hushed words. She nodded.

“How vould you like to ride in a train Lupe?”

The words hit me like a brick and buckled my knees. My wife cried and our daughter's excitement was so child-like and innocent. She had no idea the implications of his action. The price of a ticket may not have seemed like much to him but as we drew closer to the train cab and we looked up to the roof to see families riding on the top with only blankets to shield them from the cold and the rain, we knew. Knew that his simple act of kindness gave hope to a family that was hopeless.

I Can't Forget Her - Drama Monologue

I   C A N ' T   F O R G E T   H E R

BY: Paul William Fassett

That's the problem! You never get over something like this. It sticks with you forever and the harder I fight to push the memory out, the more vivid the pictures become. It's like a scab that keeps peeling off. You don't just forget people. They hang around in your head like ghosts, appearing out of nowhere. They don't care what you are doing, or how inconvenient it might be to cry at that moment. They want attention.

How do you forget a child? No matter the age. It came from me! It came from you! How do you expect me to forget that and how the fuck can you!

This isn't a matter of: “She's gone, we have to move on.” I can't get her face out of my head! She's... She's in here... Smiling at me one day. Showing the gaps where her baby teeth hadn't grown in, and the next she's in a coffin with her eyes closed. Looking so peaceful but so fucking dead!

How am I supposed to forget that? How am I supposed to move on when the only purpose I had for living the last five years is gone? What? Do I take up a hobby? Take my mind off her the way you'd take your mind off a dead pet? How do you do it? Pour alcohol on the problem? Maybe I'll take up needle point? Yeah. That will keep me from waking up in the middle of the night to an imaginary crying in my head.

You know what the worst part is? I still get panic attacks. I wake up in the middle of the night and on instinct I walk in to her room to find her crib empty and for a split second my breath gets caught in my chest. My heart starts beating out of control. I think: “Where is she?” And when I look around and see the emptiness of the room, how you gutted it. I remember, she's gone.

She's gone and I can't let go....

Simple Things - Comedy Monologue

S I M P L E   T H I N G S

BY Paul William Fassett 

I was watching. Watching them. They look like people. Move like people. Talk like people. I guess that makes them people but regardless of the outer shell, they just don't seem right. Their heads buried into a shiny black device, poking at their tiny screens with their fingers like they are piloting the Starship Enterprise through an asteroid belt.


Were we meant to be like this?


I mean, can't you imagine a time when people did things? Big things... Like... I don't know... Built shit? We live in a time where we can fly to other states, even across the oceans to get to other countries, and someone had to make that thing. The plane. Someone invented that. I mean when you consider that someone invented a flying vehicle, it's like, well what have you done lately right?


Computer chip? Fuck you! Can it fly?


Ipad? Fuck you! Can I seat a hundred people on it and shuttle them like a heavenly chariot across the ocean to a land where they don't speak my language? Uhhh noooooo. Try again.


Cell phone? Again, fuck you! Sure you might be able to facebook your friends while you take a shit but you aren't taking a shit while thirty-thousand feet in the air now are you? Nope! I thought not.


I don't know. Just seems like people just don't do anything anymore. I mean, I know we discovered the human genome and all but seriously... Where is my personal teleporter? Seventies Sci-fi told me we would be flying in a hover car right now. What did we get instead? Angry Birds.


People have become such simple things.

I Am Sorry - Drama Monologue

Day 2 and I am posting up a drama monologue. I hope you guys like it and as always, feel free to use it for auditions with the caveat that you must tell us how it went.

I   A M   S O R R Y

BY   Paul William Fassett

There is a vicious little monster eating my insides and the doctors say I got about a month to live. In doctor speak that can mean anywhere between a day and two years but I can feel it coming. I know it's not gonna be long before I'm staring up at the ceiling with morphine pumping into my body, looking at my wife's face one last time before the days disappear and I become nothing. 

There's something that I need to tell you first and I know we haven't spoken in years but it's important that I tell someone. You, my daughter, are the child of a madman.

I could never enjoy the time we spent with each other because I was so afraid. I was always looking for a reflection of myself in your face but it never showed and I am grateful for that but I am sorry that it took so long to say this. I am sorry.

I am sorry for every missed birthday these last five years. I am sorry for every time I called you something awful. I'm sorry for every Christmas card I ever threw away and I'm sorry for every time you cried and I didn't hug you until you stopped. I'm sorry I could not accept you for who you were and whoever you chose to be with. I'm sorry for the night you came over to see me, in the rain, and tried to make things right.

I'm sorry that I slammed the door in your face.

I'm sorry that it took me until my deathbed to realize what a bastard I've been and I am sorry that this letter will not reach you in time for any of this to matter. I just wanted you to know that you were always perfect just the way you were and I was the one with all the flaws.

I'm sorry that I was disappointed in you. I was disappointed in myself and every small failure on your part was a way for me to make myself feel better. A way, through you, to make my life not seem so bad.

I've spent the last three years of my life, sitting, waiting for something, while on the inside I was dying. All I needed was to write this letter.

I'm sorry I did not do it sooner.

With love,

Your father.