The first round of auditions will be held after school on Tuesday, August 8th, with callbacks to follow in all drama classes. For the first audition, please memorize and prepare one of the monologues below (choose whichever monologue you think you will perform the best).
ELLIOT. No. The docs said she can't be eating all that junk, it'll mess with her chemo, so she crawls out of bed for the first time in days and cooks eggs for breakfast. In two inches of pork chop fat. I'm like, Mom, recycle glass and plastic, not grease. She thinks putting the egg on top of a paper towel after you cook it makes it healthy. I told her, Mom, you gotta cook egg whites. In Pam spray. But it has to be her way. You gotta talk to her. I'm trying to teach her about quinoa. Broccoli rabe. Healthy stuff. So I get home the other day, she had made quinoa with bacon. She was like, "It's healthy!"
AMAN. A college buddy is making a film about Marines in Iraq. Gritty, documentary-style. He's looking for some veterans to interview. Get an authentic point of view. Maybe I could pass your number onto him. Yazmin told me you're an actor. Every actor needs a break, right? It's not just to interview. He needs a right-hand man, an expert to help him. How do Marines hold a gun? How do they kick in civilian doors, this sort of thing. How do they say "Ooh rah" in a patriotic manner? I want the movie to be accurate. And you seem not unintelligent. For a maker of sandwiches.
ORANGUTAN. I gave my parents the URL. My username, my password. They logged on and read every post I've ever put on here and for once they said they understood. They had completely cut me off but after reading this site they bought me the plane ticket. One way. I teach English in the mornings. I have a class of children, a class of teens, and a class of adults, most of whom are older than me. I am free in the afternoons. I have a paycheck which I use for legal things like ice cream, noodles, and socks. I walk around feeling like maybe I am normal. Maybe, just possibly, I'm not that different.
CHUTES&LADDERS. You know I was born just a few miles from the Pacific. In the fresh salt air. Back in "those days" I'm at Coronado Beach with a few "friends" doing my "thing" and I get sucked up under this wave. I gasp, I breathe in and my lungs fill with water. I'm like, this is it, I'm going to meet my maker. I had never felt so heavy. I was sinking to the bottom and my head hit the sand like a lead ball. My body just felt like an anvil. The next thing I know there's fingers digging in my ankles. This lifeguard pulls me out, I’m throwing up salt water. I say to him, "Hey blondie, you don't know me from Adam but you are my witness: Today's the day I start to live."
YAZ. Dissonance is still a gateway to resolution. A B-diminished chord is still resolving to? Class? C-major. A tritone is still resolving up to? The major sixth. Diminished chords, tritones, still didn't have the right to be their own independent thought. In 1965 something changed. The ugliness bore no promise of a happy ending. The ugliness became an end in itself. Coltrane democratized the notes. He said, they're all equal. Freedom. It was called Free Jazz but freedom is a hard thing to express musically without spinning into noise. Oh come on, don't make that face. I know it feels academic. You're going to leave here and become R&B hit makers and Sondheim clones and never think about this noise again. But this is Coltrane, people.
FOUNTAINHEAD. It's the first day of school and I'm knocking at your classroom door. I got my Number Two pencils, I'll sit in the front row, pay attention, and do my homework. No lesson is too basic. Teach me every technique. Any actions that keep you in the driver seat. Healthy habits and rational thoughts to blot out that voice in the back of my head. Today, I quit. My wife cannot know, she'd get suspicious if I were at meetings all the time. There can be no medical records, so therapy is out. I’m not facing a physical war. It's a psychological battle and I'm armed with two weapons: willpower and the experts. I'm taking my wife out tomorrow for our seventh anniversary and little does she know that when we clink glasses, I'll be toasting to Day One.
HAIKUMOM. Welcome to the dinner party. Granted, it's a party we never wanted to be invited to, but pull up a chair and pass the salt. Some people here may pour it in your wounds. But guess what? You had three days. For three days straight, you didn't try to kill yourself on an hourly basis. Please. Talk to your wife about your addiction. You need every supporting resource. You are in for the fight of your life. Don't take it lightly when I say a sober day for you is a sober day for me. I know you can do this but I know you can't do it alone. So stop being a highly functioning isolator and start being a highly dysfunctional person. The only way out it is through it.