Ciara Loga
Acting Minor
Monologue Experience
3-24-12

When I first found out we were going to be doing monologues in class I thought to myself, ugh something else I have to remember but it got a little better as the days went by. We started looking in books with all different monologues in them and knew I had to find a funny one because everyone always did dramatic ones because they were easier. Also because I did not want our presentation days to be all depressing, you had to laugh at a couple of them and mine was going to be one. So I look in a bunch of books and only really find two to read but knew I liked my comedic one more. The searching process for me was a lot easier than other people because I only had one to pick from when others had 2 or 3. So when we all had our monologues picked out and decided, each and every one of us would find a spot on the wall to look at and say our monologues to for practice. I picked a monologue called Black Thang, which was about crapping horses and freaking out mother in laws. For a few days in a part of the period we would speak them to our spot on the wall a few times through. Other days we would get into small groups and say them to each other for critiquing and not criticizing. To play with a lot of our emotions, we practiced saying our monologues in a very loud tone, then giving each sentence its own emotion, and speaking the whole thing in a whisper. This allowed flexibility for emotion but did not mean we were going to present them like this. It just exposes you to new thoughts and ideas to possibly make it better. By all the practice with the point on the wall, it helped me to memorize it pretty quickly and might even have been the first to. Constant repetition helps me remember a lot. So a ways into the monologue weeks, we started performing them but not full out, just for advice. The advice I got was to give every new thought its own emotion. Too be mad at the mad parts and happy on the happy parts, even if there was a happy word right in the middle of a mad sentence. That’s what made it funnier though. The class also wanted me to give each of my horses a trait or physical movement, which was a good idea and made it a lot less boring then just stating their names. After that, nobody wanted to come up and practice it, so we eventually started randomly picking off the attendance sheet. Not everyone memorized their monologues for the critique run through but mine was pretty easy to. For me I thought the practice run