Dealing with acting monologues

When dealing with acting monologues, actors always have one serious trouble: they get huge difficulties in choosing the most appropriate one. As actors, they prefer that material that show them off at their very best, the monologue that is right for each of them.

How to handle your acting monologues

This frustration has its own rapid solution. An actor must take initiative and choose more monologues to do – a large number like 15 or 20 monologues should be enough for him to take charge of his artistic choices and find out for himself what kind of material fits its personality. This will definitely help him when in position of having to audition with monologues for grad schools, agents, casting directors, summer stock or different other companies.

Most actors hate to do monologues, and they don’t know how to have fun when rehearsing them. This is why they use to stick with few monologues as possible. And they’ll use those monologues for every single audition they go to. All this situation can be easily turned if an actor decides to have a large number of monologues to choose from (15 to 20 should be just ok). This will release the pressure and let him free to do specific choices for each one. The actor will discover that monologues are true opportunity to create an entire world and to tell a wonderful story using only himself. When an actor has chosen material he is excited about, and has rehearsed so that he is telling the story clearly and truthfully, the audience is caught up in the piece and having the best experience possible: time is stopping and all they care about is the story.

In order to achieve that, an actor must find out a way of rehearsing monologues that makes sense and it is enjoyable for him. The best method is allowing him to use his acting instincts to play off the moment so that everything he does seems fresh and doesn’t look preplanned. The actor needs simple, consistent staging that shows he is comfortable moving in front of an audience, and that clearly tells his story. If the actor prefer auditioning with a monologue on camera, he still needs choices that keeps him physically alive, just on a much smaller scale. Finding the best way of working on monologues is worth the time and effort. It can make working on monologues a far richer experience, one that can bring you more satisfaction in your auditions and make you a better performer.