<p>I have a feeling that I've seen this question on the forums before, but I can't find it, so I'll ask it anyway...</p>
<p>How exactly do the audition time limits work? Some of the colleges say monologues have to be "approximately two minutes each." That's different from other schools that say "no more than two minutes each." For the ones that say "approxamitely two minutes," would 1:50-2:10 would be okay? I say that because "approximately" means around, so they won't ding you if you're a little over two minutes like I am, right?</p>
<p>And as for the schools that say "no more than however many minutes," how many colleges actually hold a stopwatch and cut you off if you're over? Would they let you go just a few seconds past?</p>
<p>If you have any personal experiences with this, I'd love to know! Thanks!</p>
<p>If a school specifies an exact time, it’s risky to go over the time limit. Aside from the obvious time issues involved in auditioning so many students, schools may want to see if you can actually follow directions! And yes, some of them will cut you off; it would be a shame to lose the last 10 seconds of your monologue. However, if they give an approximate time, you should be okay if you’re only 10 seconds over. But why not just play it safe and cut the monologue a bit – auditions are stressful enough to begin with, and you should be focused on giving a good performance rather than the time limits.</p>
<p>One thing we didn’t know before my son worked with an audition coach in the months prior to his auditions last year is how perfectly okay it is to cut a monologue down.</p>
<p>Your monologue doesn’t have to be exactly the way it appears in the script. Cutting it doesn’t necessarily mean cutting it at the beginning or the end…which might jeopardize the sense of it. It can be judiciously cut in the middle too.</p>
<p>Many monologues delivered in college auditions are actually dialogues with the responses of the other person omitted. Obviously this doesn’t work for a lot of material, but it definitely works for some, and it greatly expands the resources available to you.</p>
<p>The audition panels in college auditions would much, much rather see a monologue that is under the time limit than a longer one. Knowing how to cut something to the appropriate length is one way that you can impress them! :)</p>
<p>I wouldn’t go over the allotted time. When I auditioned for NKU someone was sitting in the front row of the theatre with a stopwatch. They warned us that we would be stopped if we went over 60 seconds</p>