Audition monologues for female characters selected from recent works by American playwrights including Tony Kushner, Jon Robin Baitz, Constance Congdon, Paula Vogel, Donald Margulies, Emily Mann, Eric Bogosian, Nicky Silver, and others. Unique to the TCG monologue series is a bibliography of other works by the playwrights included.
A SECRET WEAPON ~ Finding good monologues and scenes can be a challenge for actors. Yet monologues are an essential tool of the trade. Having an arsenal of monologues is like having a secret weapon, giving actors a way to work on their craft every day. Monologues for women are especially hard to find. Hence, the creation of RANDOM WOMEN, a book of monologues and scenes written by an actor for actors.
A diverse collection of monologues featuring the voices of women through the ages Drawn from poetry, fiction, diaries, journals, and documents of public record, these selections, although not originally intended for theatrical or cinematic performances, offer unique dramatic opportunities for actors, speakers, students, or anyone interested in women’s studies. Stefan Rudnicki has brought together selections from well-known as well as obscure authors, providing a tremendous range of women’s perspectives from a variety of sources: poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Sappho, among others; passages from Mary Shelley’s journal, the diaries of Anais Nin, and the memoirs of Isadora Duncan; polemics from Mary Wollstonecraft and Joan of Arc, as well as Susan B. Anthony’s “On Woman’s Right to Suffrage”; and selections from the novels of Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Ursula K. LeGuin, and others.
With an impressive array of speeches from a diverse range of first-class playwrights, the Faber Book of Monologues is an indispensable guide to new, untapped, and cutting-edge material. Designed for use in professional auditions as well as student workshops, each volume contains over twenty-five selections, ranging in age from twenty to sixty-five, which are culled from a rich variety of tragic, comic, realist and absurdist works by the most vibrant new playwrights, as well as critically-acclaimed pieces from established masters such as Richard Greenberg, David Hare, Neil LaBute, and Yasmina Reza. In order to foster a more nuanced association between the actor and the material, each selection includes insightful character commentary, staging and vocalization recommendations, and references to past great performances. A thoughtful introduction, written by critic Jane Edwardes, provides helpful hints for the nerve-wracking audition process.
As a director and instructor, and adminstrator of the Jane Chambers Memorial Playwriting Award, Haring-Smith draws on her experience in the theatre, arguing that actors constantly use the same sources for monologues. This second volume presents material from significant female playwrights.
Editors Tori Haring-Smith and Liz Engelman present fifty-nine previously unpublished monologues written by some of the most inspiring and exciting women now emerging onto the international stage
Clean Break is a British theatre company set up in 1979 by two women in prison. It exists to tell the stories of women with experience of the criminal justice system and to transform women's lives through theatre. Over 40 years, Clean Break has commissioned some of the most progressive and brilliant women writers to write ground-breaking plays, alongside developing the writing skills of the women they work with in its London studios and in prisons. This is a collection of monologues from this canon. Rebel Voices: Monologues for Women by Women celebrates the opportunities inherent when women represent themselves. Offering female performers a diverse set of monologues reflecting a range of characters in age, ethnicity and lived experience, the material is drawn from a mix of published and unpublished works. This book is for any performer who does not see themselves represented in mainstream plays, for lovers of radical women's theatre and for rebels everywhere who believe that the act of speaking and being heard can create change.