Playwriting

If you have ever had a feeling or a thought and wrote it down in a journal or diary, then you are on your way to becoming a playwright. Playwrights are writers who use the art of conversation to tell a story that is relatable to people like me and you. They share the inner feelings of a character through plot and dialogue. In this next unit, we will discuss how to write how we feel in the thoughts and expressions of a character in the form of a monologue.


Monologue Project


Time to express our feelings, thoughts and experiences into the mind of a character. In this project, you will create a one page conversation with only you talking to someone imaginary.
A monologue is when one person is talking on stage to someone else not seen onstage.

This monologue needs to be 45 seconds long. It can be imaginative or share something real about you. What are some things you have experienced? What is something you can share that happened to someone else? You are free to write any story, inner monologue, thought or experience on the paper. This monologue will be memorized and performed on stage under the stage lights.
 
Examples of monologues:
Lucy from You're a Good Man Charlie Brown
Charlie Brown from You're a Good Man Charlie Brown
Huck from Big River
Alice from Alice in Wonderland
Woman from Laughing Wild
A brief monologue from Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang:
Woman: I want to talk to you about life. It’s just too difficult to be alive, isn’t it, and try to function? There are all these people to deal with. I tried to buy a can of tuna fish in the supermarket, and there was this person standing right in front of where I wanted to reach out to get the tuna fish, and I waited a while, to see if they’d move, and they didn’t—they were looking at tuna fish too, but they were taking a real long time on it, reading the ingredients on each can like they were a book, a pretty boring book if you ask me, but nobody has; so I waited a long while, and they didn’t move, and I couldn’t get to the tuna fish cans; and I thought about asking them to move, but then they seemed so stupid not to have sensed that I needed to get by them that I had this awful fear that it would do no good, no good at all, to ask them, they’d probably say something like, “We’ll move when we’re ready you nagging jerk” and then what would I do? And so then I started to cry out of frustration, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, and still, even though I was softly sobbing, this stupid person didn’t grasp that I needed to get by them, and so I reached over with my fist, and I brought it down real hard on his head and screamed: “Would you kindly move butthole!!!”

And the person fell to the ground, and looked totally startled, and some child nearby started to cry, and I was still crying, and I couldn’t imagine making use of the tuna fish now anyway, and so I shouted at the child to stop crying—I mean, it was drawing too much attention to me—and I ran out of the supermarket, and I thought, I’ll take a taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I need to be surrounded with culture right now, not tuna fish.



Monologue Project Schedule

DAY ONE
Learn the principles of playwriting
DAY TWO 
Write the monologue
  • Submit for review
  • Revise corrections
  • Write Final Draft
  • Begin memorizing

DAY THREE 
Rehearse Monologue
  • Monologues will be presented and graded for memorization

DAY FOUR 
Final Performances
  • Performances will be held on stage under lights

Monologue Template