My Fellow Anglos - Comedy Monologue

M Y   F E L L O W   A N G L O S

BY

PAUL WILLIAM FASSETT

Never been too good with the whole; public speaking, thing, but here it is. I am president. I didn't actually think this would happen, you know? One day I am sitting in the bathroom of a Chili's writing some last minute material for a gig I had at this bar on Santa Monica, and now I am here. Who thought being funny would have qualified me to lead the free world.

My fellow Americans… Who opens a speech that way? It's so weird. Of course I'm American. I mean, I couldn't be German and the President, right? That's ridiculous. They outlawed that kind of thing right?

My stomach hurts. There's just, so many fucking people out there. Like… Oh my god, hundreds of people. Could be thousands, I don't know. Was never a, count the amount of jelly beans in the jar kind of guy. I think I am going to shit myself. 

I'm not ready for this. I'm not. What the hell was I thinking? Running for President. It was supposed to be a fucking joke, people! Do we not get jokes anymore?

Fuck! What have I done? Okay, yeah, I'm definitely going to shit myself. Feels like someone gave me an ipecac enema. I'm gonna end up shooting off of the toilet like one of those water pumped rockets.

Okay, Ethan. Get it together. You can't shit your pants on the first day. What would Obama do? Shit… What would Obama do? I have no idea. I don't watch the news, that shit is depressing. No, wait… What would Geroge Bush Junior do? Stumble his way through a speech, tell a fucked up joke, and spike the microphone. Alright, yeah, that might work.

Some guy is waving to me. Should I wave back? I point to myself as if asking, you want me? He looks at me like I'm retarded. Not a good start. I take those first steps towards the lights, behind the curtain, into the view of screaming crowds of people.  Expectant, hungry people, all looking up to me to feed them. Feed them what?

You know what? Screw this whole, my fellow anglo saxons shit. I'm going out there like a boss.

I'm gonna tell a dick joke.

Less Than Human Interaction - Drama Monologue

Less Than Human Interaction

Drama Monologue

I've kind of forgotten what it was like to have friends. I communicate with people who say they are my friends, but that's it. Can you call a facebook friend a friend? If so, I got a ton of those.

I just wish it was easier you know? To get to know people, and god knows I've tried. I just get the feeling that people aren't interested in making new friends, like as if the idea of having someone else in your life who is asking for a slice of your free time is just too big a commitment. Social media becomes a sort of screening process for who is worth your time, and who is worth just one hundred and forty characters.

I swore I would never sign up for an account on one of those sites ever again, but… I go through these bouts of, I don't know, I guess it's depression. I just feel like I am so far away from everyone I know, so far removed from what I know, that all I want is to touch something real, and if I can touch it, or hear it's voice, I would at least like to pretend it's real.

I started drinking again. I said I wouldn't, I know, but it's the only thing that keeps me off the ledge anymore. I just wish I knew where to go from here. I'm on an island. I put myself here, for sure, but how do I get off?

It's like I'm waiting for someone to come swing by on a boat and pick me up. It doesn't happen that way. I know it. So you know what? That's it. I'm done feeling sorry for myself. I'm gonna get on the beach, jump in the water and start swimming for the mainland, because isolation is bad enough, but feeling sorry for yourself is even worse…

(Pause)

I wonder what's on Netflix?

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.

Al Pacino's Speech From Glengarry Glen Ross - Drama Monologue

Going to post something a little different today. I couldn't find this out there in monologue form so I transcribed it from Al Pacino's awesome performance in his absolute destruction of Williamson in Glengarry Glen Ross.

You stupid fuckin cunt.

You, Williamson, I’m talking to you shit head. You just cost me six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars and one Cadillac. That’s right. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it, asshole?

You’re fucking shit. Where did you learn your trade you stupid fucking cunt? You idiot. Whoever told you that you could work with men. Ohhh I’m gonna have your job shithead.  I’m going downtown and I’m going to talk to Mitch and Murray. I’m going to Lemkin. I don’t care who’s nephew you are, who you know, who’s dick you’re sucking on, you’re going out. I swear to you, you’re going down!

Anyone in this office lives on his wits. I’ll be with you in a second.

What you are hired for is to help us. Does that seem clear to you? To help us. Not to fuck us up. To help men who are going out there to earn a living, you fairy, you company man. I’ll tell you something else, I hope you ripped the joint off because I can tell our friend here something that might help him catch you.

You want to learn the first rule, you’d know if you had ever spent a day in your life out there. You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is.

You fucking child.

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.

Knock Out! Part One - Novella

K N O C K   O U T !

P A R T   O N E

BY Paul William Fassett

Damn this mental block. It's come from working on the same thing over and over and then compounding the problem with never leaving the house. I spent the last year, maybe more just sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike me but that's just not how it works. Inspiration isn't like a living thing. It's something you force into existence by getting out there. Talking to people. I love to be around people, not just one though. I need many people. When I am around just one, things get awkward. We run out of things to talk about after about fifteen minutes and then I spend the rest of the time trying to come up with small talk to keep the whole thing going.

I guess I should describe myself, give you a mental picture of who I am. I've got average length hair. A couple inches on the top, short on the sides. It's curly and dark brown. I used to try and straighten it when it was long but whenever it would rain it would just get curly again and frizzy. Frizzy was the worst. Made me look like I had an afro. I tried everything from hairspray to putting corn oil in it. Yes, cooking oil. I expended a lot of energy trying to pretend I was something that I wasn't, that now that I am older I don't know who I am. I guess I am average with a few exceptions. I have a uni-brow. I pluck it of course but on days that I forget it's very obvious and sometimes I go weeks without plucking it and don't realize until someone makes a comment.

I work at a restaurant for people who want to seem fancy but don't want to spend a whole lot of money to prove it. It's called The Hunter's Lodge and there are tons of pictures of hunting dogs and guys in those Sherlock Holmes hats looking off into the distance with a rifle in hand. I went from being a busboy to a fry-cook in a year. Not exactly a move up but it was slightly more money, so I guess there's that.

I was walking back home from work that night, because my car was permanently fucked, costing me about four hundred dollars a month to maintain. It was currently sitting in a permanent parking spot in my apartment complex and I had to get the tags updated just to keep the landlord from towing it.

So yeah, my life was pretty much in the shitter. The only thing I had to look forward to was boxing. I paid thirty-five dollars a month for a locker and the privilege to take all of my aggression out on a heavy bag. I never trained with anyone there because the private lessons were stupid expensive. That's about half a weeks pay. Not that I would have wanted to train seriously. The idea of being punched in the head for a living is the last thing I would call a good time.

I guess that brings me to the event. My apartment is nothing to write home about. It's about four-fifty a month and less than that in square footage. I had some noisy neighbors too. Real rioters. The guys below me blast their music at a decible just shy of a jet engine and all hours of the night too. The girl living next door doesn't make a whole lot of noise though she is coming and going at all hours of the night. Anytime someone closes their doors around here it vibrates our paper mache walls like a gun shot going off.

That brings me to the trouble. The whole ordeal that's got me tied to a chair in some guys fucking basement.