Not in the Script

Performance Monologues from Unexpected Places

John McCallum, Jennifer Nicholls

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781760620103
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

After creation, Eve begins a journal.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%King David's son discovers the eagle's egg.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%A soldier recalls the face of his dead comrade.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%An Iraqi woman speaks of fear and pride.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%A Wongaibon woman finds family, country and a scruffy dog.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%Dalit poetry defies poverty and marginalisation.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%An intersex youth claims true identity.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%'In any piece worth performing there is something happening underneath that is not in the script.'%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%This monologue collection offers up a challenge: to perform with voices that aren't from play scripts. Working instead from fiction, non-fiction and poetry, these pieces are a fresh and sharp source of material for performance, auditions and workshops. Unusual sources provide the actor or drama student with a new array of monologue possibilities.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%The characters range from lovers in the King James Bible to a sci-fi Artificial Intelligence unit navigating gender identities between planets. Classic sources include Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Ulysses and The Bell Jar and work from Beckett, Kafka and Mark Twain. Strong contemporary monologues come from work by Raymond Carver, Miranda July, Elena Ferrante, Jeffrey Eugenides, Alice Munro and David Sedaris. Australian voices speak in iconic moments from Jasper Jones and John Marsden's Tomorrow series and from definitive work by David Malouf, Elizabeth Jolley, Geraldine Brooks, Morris Gleitzman, Jeanine Leane, Gayle Kennedy and Alice Pung.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%These monologues speak from moments of radical change and subtle exploration. Beneath each is a well-crafted literary work with its own world of characters, conflicts and tension: we invite you to look beyond the script.

INTRODUCTION

In any piece worth performing there is something happening underneath that is not in the script. As in life, people say things that they do not mean, for reasons that they do not fully understand. Or they say things that are profoundly influenced, or even contradicted, by the state of the world – the world of the performance or the world we actually live in.

The action of the piece is the audience’s growing understanding of the interplay between what is and what is not in the script. It could be their gradual realisation that not all is as it seems, or sometimes their knowledge that the character is lying, deluded, concealing something from themselves, masking a deeper truth, or perhaps simply being mischievous. A good performer finds that underlying action and plays it, while at the same delivering the words and performing the activities. The audience picks up cues and clues that guide their expectations, which keep changing as the theatrical structure of the piece is developed.

In a monologue taken from a play or specially written for performance, this covert action is often a subtext, or a dramatic irony in which the audiences knows something that the character doesn’t. The pieces collected here sometimes use subtext and irony, but more often they take their action from a gradually-revealed context. The questions that guide the audience’s expectations, and therefore the action, are not ‘What is this person telling me?’ but ‘Why are they telling me this?’, ‘What is it about the world that I know that makes me doubt what they are saying?’ or simply ‘What is really going on underneath this?’ Sometimes we come to know the answers as we watch, and sometimes we don’t, and continue to wonder. Often a revelation at the end will change our entire understanding of what we have been experiencing.

The other, more obvious, reason for the title of this anthology is that none of these pieces come from a play or a monologue written to be performed. They are taken from short stories, novels or memoirs, in which complex worlds can be created in ways that are different from the ways in which they are created in plays. Many novels explain everything, in a way that plays cannot and should not try to do. The narrative voice of a novel written in the third person can know much more than any of the characters ever can. Even in the case of a novel written in the first person, perhaps by an unreliable narrator, there will often be two or three hundred pages of context that is very hard to play on stage in the brief time allowed for a performance for an exam or an audition.

But it is worth the effort. These pieces are offered as provocations. The aim of this anthology is to encourage students and actors wanting interesting pieces to perform to look beyond the usual sources. The ones chosen here are sometimes challenging but they all have something interesting to play with.

There is some wonderful writing here. The language, whether formal or vernacular, is to be relished. You can have a lot of fun speaking the words of these great authors. You can also create characters who speak to someone – the audience or someone else imagined on the stage – for interesting reasons that will allow you to lead, tease and provoke the audience. In many of these pieces you will have to evoke, in the dialogue passages, several figures other than the speaker, but in all of them there is your character playing the voices. When you are performing dialogue with other characters it is always your character whose attitude inflects how the other people speak. You can convey a lot about your character by how he or she speaks what they are saying. You may need to add or delete words or phrases, once you have found the central character, to make the piece your own.

The people speaking here come from many different backgrounds of time period, class, gender and culture. There are men and women; there are characters from many different cultural backgrounds; and there are people speaking from a wide range of experiences – some terrible, some joyful, some sad, some cheerful – but all of them, we think, are in some way transformed, at least within the piece as you will be performing it. There is even one (Breq) who is an Artificial Intelligence disturbed by what it feels as the stirrings of a human conscience.

We encourage you to be sensitive to issues of identity. It is sometimes not appropriate to perform an identity other than your own. If you have a point to make, it needs to become part of the action you are performing. Some identities are masked and some not. A character’s sexuality can ‘come out’ as the action develops, but their physical characteristics are obvious as soon as they walk onstage. A woman is a woman and a man is a man, when you look at them onstage, but sometimes gender distinctions can be blurred, as they are in some of these pieces, such as Cal’s.

Apart from the material from fiction and memoirs we have also included a poem, one of the greatest ever written, ‘Song of Solomon’, and another, offered as a little gift at the end: a wonderful work by the Dalit writer Jyoti Lanjewar. It is short but worth having a go at performing.

Before each piece there is a brief introduction explaining the context and also what we think you might be able to do with it in performance, but if you take up any of these pieces we strongly encourage you to go back to the source, read it and take on board what underlies the piece while you are working on how to perform it. We have chosen specific passages to include here but in all of the books from which they come there is plenty of other good material to play. And there are plenty of other good books.

You just have to look for the first-person narratives, a speaker with her or his own voice. In the opening piece here by Miranda July, a distinctively individual voice is deflected, for emotional reasons, into the third person. So perhaps you can look for possible performance pieces in third-person narratives too.

You can edit these pieces to suit your own performance, adding phrases for clarity or cutting material that, as you work on them, might not seem to fit. For example, you might like to remove certain descriptive phrases or words like ‘he said’ or ‘she said’. We hope that drama and theatre students, and actors, will find good material to work with here. For the purposes of public examination or audition there are no copyright concerns, but if you subsequently perform these pieces for a paying audience then you will need to get performance permission.

We have assumed that you may not have access to a lot of production resources and that you will be alone on stage, with perhaps some basic costumes, props and sound. For most of these pieces it will just be you and your audience, which is as it should be.

We have had a wonderful time reading these books and choosing the pieces. We would like to thank the many people who have pointed us towards great books that we hadn’t read before, and especially those whose suggestions have ended up here: Stefania Cox, Deborah Franco, Claire Grady, George Mannix, Jessica McCallum, Miranda McCallum, Penny McCue, Robyn Philip, Emma Rose Smith, Christine Stevenson and Angela Voerman.

John McCallum and Jenny Nicholls

Sydney, 2016

This Person

From no one belongs here more than you

by Miranda July

This is a complete stand-alone text, with no context other than what you can glean from what is said in it. The speaker obviously means herself when she talks about ‘this person’ and there is a great deal of emotional subtext when you play it for this. In performance she would be talking to the audience about what is clearly at first a fantasy. You could prompt the audience every time she says ‘this person.’

In the happy first part of the text there are many hints about what ‘this person’ has been through, and in the second part there seems to be an underlying loneliness.

Maybe she is depressed, and so retreats to her bath to escape; or maybe she is being sensible, after having a fantasy that we can all understand (everyone she has ever known suddenly loving her). Maybe she settles happily into her bath because she simply wants to get on with her life. In performance it would be good to keep several possibilities open, in a state of theatrical tension. In any case, the journey is from the fantasy to the reality.

Someone is getting excited. Somebody somewhere is shaking with excitement because something tremendous is about to happen to this person. This person has dressed for the occasion. This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. This person is laughing out loud with relief and playing the message back to get the address of the place where every person this person has ever known is waiting to hug this person and bring her into the fold of life. It is really exciting, and it’s not just a dream, it’s real.

They are all waiting by a picnic table in a park this person has driven past many times before. There they are, it’s everyone. There are balloons taped to the benches, and the girl this person used to stand next to at the bus stop is waving a streamer. Everyone is smiling. For a moment this person is almost creeped out by the scene, but it would be so like this person to become depressed on the happiest day ever, and so this person bucks up and joins the crowd.

Teachers of subjects that this person wasn’t even good at are kissing this person and renouncing the very subjects they taught. Math teachers are saying that math was just a funny way of saying ‘I love you.’ But now they are simply saying it, I love you, and the chemistry and PE teachers are also saying it and this person can tell they really mean it. It’s totally amazing. Certain jerks and idiots and assholes appear from time to time, and it is as if they have had plastic surgery, their faces are disfigured with love. The handsome assholes are plain and kind, and the ugly jerks are sweet, and they are folding this person’s sweater and putting it somewhere where it won’t get dirty. Best of all, every person this person has ever loved is there. Even the ones who got away. They hold this person’s hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back. This person almost can’t believe it, it seemed so real, this person’s heart was broken and has healed and now this person hardly knows what to think. This person is almost mad. But everyone soothes this person. Everyone explains that it was absolutely necessar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Source List
• Related Titles
• Copyright Details