KCACTF: Preparing A Great Audition Monologue (Part 3)

How to Perform:

Practice your entrance, introduction, monologue and exit.  They are always watching you.  Carry yourself with confidence and show them what you’ve got!  During the intro they get to see you as a human (sane, stable, mature).  Rehearse your four seconds between the intro and your monologue.  You need to know what you need to get yourself into it.  If you are doing two monologues, do not take off your glasses or a jacket or ruffle hair in between for characterization, this seems “fakey fake.”

If you mess-up and they are on a strict schedule, just keep going.  Have a safety line near the end that you can go to.  If it is a smaller room and there is no stopwatch, ask to start again.  Do not bow afterwards, this looks messy and unprofessional.  Do not sing unless you can really sing.

“In life, people do not know that they are going to be speaking for a long time.  Thoughts are triggered; you have to further explain yourself.”  This is something I actually have to work on in Fat Pig.  Multiple times my character changes her train of thought or how she wants to explain something.  You cannot just read the lines.  You must take time and let the thoughts develop in your character’s head.

“A monologue is all about the other person.  You can make the other person do whatever you want them to do.  It is so much less about what is going on emotionally and so much more about what the other person is doing and what you want them to do.  Look line by line and decide what the other person is doing.”  Wow, this really takes a lot of pressure off of you as an actor.  Instead of trying to pull up all of these emotions out of nowhere, this gives you something to do.  You are focused on the other person.  You are acting to make them do something and this will much more naturally allow you to react.

You should have an overall objective as well as tiny objectives that are measurable in the moment.  To get to your objectives, try different tactics along the way.  “Raise the stakes!  Playwrights don’t write plays on normal days.”

“Along the way at least one thing needs to change.  You need to learn something new.”  This is quite beautiful.  What point would theatre have if it did not make a difference or affect the way that people think?  In a performance of whatever size, even a monologue, there must be some element that is discovered and shared with the audience.

KCACTF: Preparing A Great Audition Monologue (Part 2)

"The quicker you can get to love auditioning, the better.  View it as your time in that day to perform, to be an actor.  View it as a performance, not a contest."  I think that if we as actors can get this through our heads, this would make auditioning so much more exciting.  I personally love this view because I am not very competitive.  When I perform monologues or whatever it is I am asked to do as an audition, I need to embrace it as an opportunity to act.

Big Secret:  "The people auditioning you really want you to be good.  They want you to be able to solve their problem.  They need good actors.  They want you to be the one."  Okay, this is something that made quite a breakthrough in my head.  Why is it that I think a professional audition would be full of casting directors waiting for me to mess up?   Of course they would be on the other side wanting me to succeed because it makes their jobs easier.  This realization was a huge confidence boost.

“We want to know not only if you are a good actor, but also a good human.”  You want to come off as an “intelligent, nice young person who likes your fellow humans.”  “If you are well-prepared and happy with yourself and your life, you can celebrate and support your fellow actors.”  Yes, yes, yes!  This is something that I feel USF does very well.  Our department is full of family actors that genuinely care for one another.  I love being able to go to our auditions and be excited to act with my friends.  I love being able to embrace their talent and celebrate the show regardless of the casting.

KCACTF: Preparing A Great Audition Monologue (Part 1)

Material Selection: 

Choose a monologue of a character that you could actually play in real life.  Actual age range and type-how you look, who you are.  Show off your skills.  The character should be easily accessible to you emotionally-you need to understand it.  It should be contemporary (less than ten years old).  Read the New York Times, find playwrights who sound good to you and order their works.  The monologue needs to be from plays.  A selection from a monologue book does not show that you know the play-they are looking for smart actors.  Avoid monologues that are only telling a story, this is really hard to make present and active.  Be careful of rants or manifestos and avoid ubersexual.  It would be hard to find a good monologue from a musical because the really great one-person talking is usually expressed through a song rather than monologue.  If you are gonna do a monologue with a dialect, you better be darn good at it.  Try to avoid dialect though because it seems like you are trying to show a skill.  It is very hard to do style in 90 seconds, do realistic.

What to know:

Who the character is and what is happening in the scene.  What are the circumstances of the play?  What is this monologue about?  Why does the character choose to speak now?  The tone of the monologue goes back to the playwright.

KCACTF: Dialogue

Debbi, Colin, and I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to attend a dialogue workshop.  The three of us are part of the cast for The Importance of Being Earnest and we thought it would be beneficial to take any opportunity we can get to work on our accents.  To our delight, the man teaching the workshop actually used Earnest for multiple examples.  :)

He taught us how to change our vowel sounds.  Long "o"- lips say "o", rest of mouth says "a".  Short "o"-closed off and quick (got).  Short "a"- quick, such as "action" and "pack".  For words with "ary", drop the "a" (hereditary-hereditry, extroardinary-extroardinry).  Other pronunciatoins:  it is-tis, it was-twas, when-hwen, get-git.  For the sentence "Where were you today?"- "Hwer wer you today?"  Shape the "u" in duty, absolutely, during.

Americans speak with the sound further down in the throat  and tend to be very monotone.  The British speak with the tongue and teeth, they use a wide vocal range from falsetto to their lower register throughout their sentences.  "Keep the energy at the front of the mouth, annunciate, articulate."

4 Movie Night Invites

Tonight I had four different invitations to movie nights:  "Deja Vu" in Kroske, "Space Jam" in Burgess, "The Help" in Grand Island, and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" in Brandon Hanson's room.  This may not seem to be very significant, and it truly is not, but it did make me think.  Before I get all philosophical, I will say that I went to "Deja Vu" at 8:30 then left at 10 for "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

I would like to say that I love the USF campus.  I love how proactive students are with creating their own fun.  There is rarely a dull moment.  Three of the movie nights were set-up for dorm-life involvement and the one in Brandon's room was for our weekly theatre-group movie night.  We select a movie each week that we are all interested in watching then boom!  Pop it in!  Tonight's movie night even included Taco John's Twilight Tacos.

I had a great night with my friends, but it is interesting to think that my night could have gone so many other ways had I chosen to attend a different movie night.  I am not sure who all was at the other ones.  I could have reconnected with people I haven't seen in awhile, possibly met some new freshmen, who knows.  It is just crazy to think how such a small choice still has an affect on your life.

How do you title something as horrible as this?

With a social networking site such as facebook it is easy for news to spread fast.  Usually it is something such as "Lauren and Samual are now in a relationship" or "I can't believe the Bachelor didn't choose her!!!!!!"  Today I got on and saw numerous posts on my home feed about a tragedy:  the 37 year-old mother of two students from my old high school was killed in a car accident.  I am in shock just thinking about this.

West Central is a small school with about one hundred students in each grade.  The town of Hartford has a population of just under two thousand, I believe.  Needless to say, everybody knows everybody and everything.  On the two kids's facebook walls there are numerous posts of prayers and condolences.  Some from their close friends, some by people who just know they by association.  This is surely a horror that will affect the whole town.

My Uncle Chad actually gave me a call this evening to ask me about what had happened.  I of course did not know any details, but shared what knowledge I had read.  He lives in Sioux Falls but had heard about it and figured I might know more because I had gone to school with them.

I don't know what to say.  I feel absolutely awful.  It was all so sudden.  How does stuff like this happen?  How are her kids supposed to carry on the rest of their school year, let alone the rest of their lives?  When something as awful and heart-wrenching as this happens, what is it that keeps us going when all we want to do is curl up in a little ball and cry our eyes out?  I just want to do something for them.  I want to help.  There is nothing I can do.  I cannot fix this or console them.  I can pray.  I can ask God to be the one to hold them and carry them through.  Even so, there is still so much pain.  This makes me feel so sick and helpless.

KCACTF: Say What? Making Your Characters Speak on the Page

We were all very excited to attend this workshop because we thought it would be geared towards actors and how we can bring characters to life from scripts.  When the doors were closed and we were told that we were there to learn how to create realistic characters when writing scripts, we all looked around at each other and made faces of "Oh crap!"  Haha!  We were at a workshop for writers.  It all ended up fine though because the workshop was very interesting and I learned a lot about characterization and interpreting what the playwright is trying to say.

"As a writer, it is just words on the page until we give it to the performer.  A good performer can bring out ideas you hadn't thought of.  Your words are not set in stone, they are not solid ground.  Things may change, this is okay!"  Putting on my writer brain, I am trying to think about how I would take this.  I could imagine myself sitting in a room with an actor discussing my work and being very hesitant to make changes.  There would be a lot of "buts" and explaining why I wanted something worded a certain way.  I have so much respect for people who can pour out so much time and emotion and allow others to perform and interpret it.  He said, "This is not the book world.  This goes into other people's hands and they have to be able to do something with it."

What do you know about your character?  Specifics include:  age, gender, physicality, education, economics, profession, religion, location, and point of origin.  "You have to write these things into the script or the person won't get it.  You are handing this off, give them all that you possibly can."

Questions to ask:  Intelligence level?  Any mental illnesses?  Learning experiences?  How does the character see him/herself?  How does the character believe that he/she is perceived by others?  Does the character seem to be ruled by emotion?  Introvert or extrovert?  How does the character deal with anger, sadness, conflict or loss?  What does the character want out of life?  What would the character change in life?  Judgemental, generous, stingy, polite, rude?

Words:  speech patterns, slang, jargon, vocab, poetic, lyrical, dirty, impediments, interrupts.  A speech pattern in a distinctive manner of oral expression.  The expression is determined by the personality created for that particular character.  Slang is based on:  location, region, social group, religious group, age, gender, time period, education.  "Slang changes all the time.  It's the actor's and director's job to bring it to life and look things up."  Jargon is the language, especially vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group (such as medical jargon, CSI, etc.)  It is unintelligable, meaningless talk or writing-gibberish.

His suggestions for where to come up with stories and dialogue was to "go somewhere, grab a cup of coffee and just listen to people talk."  He also mentioned reading small town newspapers.  He once found an article titled "Dog Shoots Owner with Gun."  Haha, now that would make for an interesting story!

"All dialogue should be moving toward something."  According to Alfred Hitchcock, a good story is "life with the dull parts pulled out."  "Don't let your dialogue turn into too much narrative.  Start your story in the middle of something."  He also suggested to use profanity sparingly because it can clog a good story or script.

Haha, a quote I enjoyed was, "Actors need words, don't make them improvise!"  As an actress I very much appreciate all of the hard work that goes into creating a script.  This workshop allowed me to understand the process of creating characters.  I will use this knowledge when developing my characters for the stage.  I will also pay attention to every coma, pause, or beat that is in a script and do my work with researching anything that is written that I do not understand.  Thank you writers!!!!!!  :)