MonologuesToGo has published a new book which launched this past December: 101 Awesome Original Monologues for 20-Somethings. Now you can have 101 monologues at your disposal, in addition to downloading a MtG monologue instantly!
In celebration of the book’s release, here’s an excerpt from the foreword by Broadway director Michael Wilson:
I fell in love with theater fifty years ago, when at age six I played the title role in the school play at St. John’s Lutheran. Adapted from the beloved children’s story, The Little White Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings proved to be an irresistible stage debut. As the play’s hero, I was given a very satisfying arc to perform – full of real choices and surprises – and the play had magic. Real magic.
At graduation, my preschool teacher gifted me with the Scholastic edition of The Little White Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings, a very thoughtful and eye-opening gift, as it turned out. For I soon discovered in the catalogue listing of this august young people’s publishing house, many books for me lay in wait.
What Scholastic did not have – and I so wished it had – was 101 Awesome Original Monologues. In this new, indispensable collection of speeches written expressly as audition material for beginning to mid-career actors, authors Joyce Storey and Talia Pura have created a treasure trove of characters and stories that offer the reader far many more riches. For actors who are either starting their careers or for those more seasoned who wish to diversify their repertoire of audition selections, this book offers an extraordinary range of attention-worthy characters in situations that are recognizable to both actor and audience.
Young actors finally have the volume of speeches written with them in mind. Not only do the monologues conform to theatrical time (urgency! brevity!), but they are the ideal showcase for a performer as the authors know how and where to leave room for the actor’s voice. More advanced actors will find in this book an abundant number of fresh, well-written monologues from which they can choose material that will both shake up their practice and wake up the audition room. I can only imagine my delight when meeting an actor for the first time in a general audition, once they’ve dispensed with the overly done and too often not realized Blanche DuBois or Troy Maxson speeches, they launch into Storey’s compelling “Minimum Wage” (with its razor-sharp desperation redolent of Margie in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People) or Pura’s empathetic “Cop Training”, a timely, dignified portrait of a young cadet questioning his or her destiny.
As a director, I would be interested to hear these speeches, and know more about the actor who sought out such new and original material.
You can purchase 101 Awesome Original Monologues for 20-Somethings on Amazon at this link.
