Great Monologues

I’m currently organizing my library

and because I have nearly nothing to do this summer I’ll upload it and you can choose what plays I’ll read for monologues next. In essence, you’re controlling the monologues. 

Cheers. 

Blood Wedding/ Federico Garcia Lorca/ Bride

I’ve come so she can kill me and they can take me with the others. My flesh is still warm and it shouldn’t be. Not your hands though- go get some wire or a sickle. It has to be hard so the inside of me snaps. It’s meaningless but I want you to know I’m virgin. You can put me in the soil knowing that. I left with another man. That’s what I did. Maybe you would have too. I was sick! I’d been too close to the fire. I was sick from that time. I thought your boy, your son, my husbandI chose for myself, would help. Cool me. Be my balm. He was perfect. A glass of clean , clear water. Who might bring children, land, health and I wanted him. But Leonardo screamed out to me and now I think he always would. He set a thousand birds off to stop me on my way. He bubbled like a river across the plain. Full of weeds and trees and dark tuneless songs. I didn’t want him! I didn’t choose him! I wanted yours. I wanted your son. He was my future, my end, believe me! I was dragged by Leonardo, a wave, a nature I couldn’t hold off. I would always have heard his moan in that dark filthy river. I think I hated him. I couldn’t keep away! If all the babies of your son’s sons were hanging off my balding hair, I would go to him, that’s the truth. I’d always have left.

Eigengrau/ Rose/ Penelope Skinner

I can’t believe I live with a real life feminist. My mum was so into that whole Gernaine Greer Simone de Belle Jour thing. You know? Burning her bra. Sleeping around. Come on. Do me the rest! I thought it was about porno. Because I was going to say to you I know this guy right. American. He was in the gym one day and this guy came up to him and said, ‘Hey man you’ve got a big wanger do you want to be in my movie?’ And this guy (the guy I know) what was his name? I think it was Douglas? I might have his number actually if you want it. But anyway he was like, ‘Yeah sure’ and the next day he was on set literally just having sex with all these women, getting paid thousands of dollars. It’s his job now. He’s loaded. Yeah. Because before that he sold hot dogs.  I used to hate hot dogs. That cheap sort of meat. Do you know what I mean?

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Thanks for making my day, I hope this blog helps makes yours. 

I will be traveling to London to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art this upcoming semester. If you wish to follow the adventure there here is my travel blog:

http://awanderingmolly.blogspot.com/

Cheers and thanks!

Vinegar Tom/ Joan/ Caryl Churchill

I been a witch these ten years. Boys was always calling after me and one day I said to a boy, ‘Boy, boy you call me witch but when did I make your arse to itch.’ And he ran off and I met a little grey kitling and the kitling said, ‘You must go with me’ and I said ‘Avoid, Satan.’ And he said ‘You must give me your body and soul and you’ll have all happiness.’ And I did. And I gave him my blood everyday and that’s my old cat Vinegar Tom. And he lamed John Peter’s son that’s a cripple this day, that was ten years ago. And I had two more imps sent me crept in my bed in the night sucking my privy parts so sore they hurt me and wouldn’t leave me. And I asked them to kill Mary Johnson who crossed me and she wasted after. And everyone knows Annie that had fits and would knash her teeth and took six strong men to hold her. That was me sent those fits to her. My little imps are like moles with four feet but no tails and a black color. And I’d send them off and they’d come back in the night and say they did what I said. Jack is lucky I didn’t bewitch him to death and Margary, but she was kind to me long ago. But I killed their cows like I killed ten cows last year. And the great storm and tempest comes when I call it and strikes down trees. But now I’m in prison and my powers all gone or I’d call down thunder and twist your guts.

If I Should Have a Daughter by Sarah Kay

” If I should have a daughter… instead of “Mom”, she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”
 
She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.
 
And “Baby,” I’ll tell her. “Don’t keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick, you’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.”
 
But I know that she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boats nearby, ‘cause there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix. But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything if you let it.
 
I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat. To look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. Because that’s how my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this.
 
“There’ll be days like this,” my momma said. “When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,” ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.
 
You will put the “wind” in win some lose some, you will put the “star” in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.”
 
And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
 
“Baby,” I’ll tell her “remember your mama is a worrier but your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.
 
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
 
Your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing and when they finally hand you heartbreak, slip hatred and war under your doorstep, and hand you hand-outs on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.” “

Tongue of a Bird/ Maxine/ Ellen McLaughlin

Charlotte. Charlotte Hobart. I am looking for you. Serious girl, almost pretty, shy, quiet. A good girl. On your report card, you teacher writes: “She seems to be in love with nature. Rather romantic and solitary.” I know the type. Always looking out of windows.
Twelve years old. What goes on in that head of yours? Sex? What do you know about it? What you read in books? Movies? There is a kid in your class who punches your arm a lot and that does mean something. There is one day when you are alone with him in a barn and you find yourselves discussing religion. You lie on your backs and he lazily tosses a baseball straight up to the rafters. Leather smacks neatly into leather. At the moment you say, “I think God exists in everything- the barn swallows, the straw, the dirt beneath my fingernails, your sneaker.” And it so happens that his investigations into things have led him to the same conclusion. “Everything is sacred,” he says. And there is a long silence because what now can be said? You lie there, not looking at each other, not touching each other either. But then you don’t have to. It was as perfect as it gets. Charlotte Hobart. What is being done to you? What is being done to you right now? Oh Jesus. 

Tongue of a Bird/ Maxine/ Ellen McLaughlin

There’s a girl, this is me, standing at a high window, looking down. She tells herself: you will remember this. And I do. I remember everything. But I don’t remember why I remember this. It is morning and I am looking down across a vast landscape and I’ve lost something which I think I will spot from this height. The farther up you are the more you see. This is true. I have learned this since…and it’s like a fliker of light sometimes, perhaps the glint of a climber’s goggles, the quirk, almost discernable, of the wrong color, the dropped glove, the upturned shoe. These things, the slight, the rare, I see them as other’s don’t, I am gifted -and here, there’s something about this memory but I can’t…
A fly, I know, is buzzing up the window, a trapped fly, going up the air, which it finds strangely hard and unyielding, going up when it means to be going out. This is crucial but I don’t know why. Perhaps it just tells me the season, which must be a late autumn, a time when flies are dying in just this way, going up when they mean to be going out. And it seems to me that all nature is dying on this day. Except me, who stands and watches. So there’s the fly and there’s the landscape, dropped like a platter below me. 
I see it as if I were above it, looking down over the back of my own blonde head. I see most of my past this way, remembered with a detachment which looks cooly down on a child I am, experiencing some dreadful thing, which I experienced but didn’t, and experience again in recalling it, but don’t. 
There is that girl, who is me, so far below me, who might have lived my life if I hadn’t left her there and come up here to watch her. I was so terribly good at that. A trick I learned so early. 
So I became a flyer.
But she asked me to remember this. So I look down with her on the bald hills of some uncertain autumn, and we hear the fly and wait. 

Just so we’re clear

a few followers have expressed displeasure with the fact that some of the material (George Bush and Eve Ensler)I post is not (in theatrical terms) a monologue. I use this site to classify and keep copies of playable monologues in every sense of the term. So when I post things that are not theatrical monologues (i.e. by a play) the format will be Title of Piece by Author. When it’s from a play the format will be Title of Play/Author/Character. I understand this can be confusing and I’m more than happy to answer any questions about what is usable as a monologue in audition settings and what is not. Until then, happy monologuing.