Hi!
So I’ve recently been looking into getting a BFA in acting, which means I’ll have to go through an auditioning process. I know that monologues in general have to be something from a published work, and often something that reflects you or you can relate with. But–I don’t know where to begin.
I don’t really have the money to spend to look through lots of plays until I find one with a monologue that fits, so I was wondering if there’s any good resources to find monologues (and then I could purchase the play and read it) for both contemporary and classical pieces?
Thanks so much!
Is there a good public or college library near you? You can get most of the classical stuff on Project Gutenberg (anything off copyright, so Shakespeare, Moliere, Aristophanes, etc.) The contemporary stuff will be harder to find in libraries, but you might try parking in a good used bookstore for an hour or two and reading through whatever they have in drama. Also other people have had good luck calling The Drama Bookshop in NYC at off hours and asking for recommendations. There are books full of monologues, but most people advise against them since whatever’s easily available gets overdone really quickly. Do you have any favorite plays? Are there parts for your age in them? If you get into a BFA acting program, you will be reading lots and lots of plays, so it’s a good way to find out whether you like it or not.
This takes a little bit of Internet savvy, but I helped D find a number of monologues this way:
If you know a name of the play you’re interested in, go to Google Books and see if they have excerpts posted. Often times you can get enough information this way to see if it’s something up your alley and you might spend money to order. I would save a link to a book in my favorites and let D see if they resonated with her.
Playscripts.com and Samuel French also have pretty liberal policies when it comes to posting excerpts. Check out their sites and search engines and you’ll narrow the possibilities down.
As long as you can figure out how to narrow down your type (m/f, age, contemporary, funny/dramatic, etc), you can do a lot of researching without purchasing.
Another thing we did is go to Dramatists.com and look through the list of Pulitzer winning plays. Sometimes there were good gems in there (August Osage County being an example when we were looking for a teen girl monologue plucked straight from the Pulitzer list).
It’s hard work, but also a treasure hunt.
Are you close to a major theater company that might have a play library you could peruse? My D also found monologues that way.
Good luck!
Another thing I did was look at college websites and see what plays they had done in the last 5-10 years. D looked at to see if there were any plays she was interested in. We typically looked at schools that we knew she wasn’t applying to, as not to do a monologue from a current play at the school.
@Jkellynh17 Thank you! The libraries in my town don’t have a wide-range in the drama section, but I didn’t think about going to colleges. I’ll try visiting some college libraries as well as libraries in the outlying towns. As for reading plays, I’ve never really ‘read’ plays for leisure, but I’ve read a couple in class. But those were more with a cast of adults, and I’m afraid my favorites (and their playwrights, for that matter) aren’t really geared towards what I need 
@2019theatremom Ohh thank you for the suggestion of sites and tips! I’ll also look into some colleges and see what plays they’re putting on–I didn’t think of that!
@mrfj18, your local library might have an inter library loan program that includes some college libraries in its network (ours does), so if you know what you’re looking for, you can request it that way. Of course, if you want to browse, you might need to go to a good college library and actually park yourself in the stacks.
Ah, I didn’t see this message until now; Thank you for the advice and information! ^^