I've been having some conversations online with folks who are facing acting auditions, and who therefore need to choose which monologues to use. This advice I am hoping will be useful whether you are auditioning for an amateur production, a professional production, or for entrance into an educational program. The focus is on a stage audition, but some information will also apply to film or TV auditions. And you may find some of the advice also applicable to choosing a song for a musical theatre audition.
In future posts, I may go into more detail about what to do after you have chosen your monologues, but let's go one step at a time.
The only hard and fast rule is that you MUST follow any instructions from the people you are auditioning for. If they ask for one classical and one contemporary, then you MUST have one classical and one contemporary. If they say they prefer Shakespeare for your classical, then you really should choose Shakespeare for your classical. If they say you have three minutes maximum for your monologues, then you MUST be sure to keep the total running time for your monologues under three minutes.
Apart from following the instructions from the people you are auditioning for, however, there really aren't any absolute rules. Everything else in this post is just meant as a guideline. I have probably seen ALL of these guidelines broken successfully by some auditioner somewhere. If you really know what you are doing, then you may get away with breaking these guidelines. But if you are just starting out, you probably should stick pretty close to the guidelines.
First of all, you should find a monologue that is appropriate for your type. That is to say, it should be from a character that you reasonably could be cast as (in a "not-too-weird" production). At a minimum, the character should be the same gender (male or female) as yourself, and should be within the age range you could reasonably play--for most people this will be, at most, ten years from their actual age. Yes, in high school productions you may have been cast as the opposite gender, or may have played characters much much older than yourself, but this is not going to happen now that you are auditioning in the "real world". Age and gender are two of the most significant definers of your "type" but there are also others to think about (which may need a separate post all to itself).
Your monologue should almost certainly be taken from a play. Not from a TV show, a movie, a novel, or so on. These are very different media, and have very different requirements. If you take a monologue from a film or TV show, the auditors may think you are somebody who is completely ignorant about the world of theatre, which is not the impression you want to give.
The monologue you choose should stand on its own, in that the auditors should be able to understand what is basically going on just from hearing the monologue. You will not be able to "explain" the monologue.
Make sure that you have read the whole play that your monologue comes from. This will ensure that you actually understand everything that is going on for the character and the correct context for the monologue. Best of all is to use a monologue that you have actually spoken in a play you were actually in!
You want to avoid any monologue that the folks you are auditioning for have heard someone perform better than you. Your goal should make your performance the best performance they have heard of that particular monologue. For a new actor, this means you should probably avoid taking a monologue from a famous, often-performed play. There is also a peculiar category of monologues that are performed by auditioners much much more then the plays they come from are performed. Directors tend to groan when they realize they are going to have to listen to that same darn monologue AGAIN. Once when I was holding auditions, there were two actresses in a row who performed the very same monologue!
I suspect that those notorious "monologue books" are at least partly responsible for this problem. Actors who are choosing monologues all go and read the same "monologue books" instead of searching out plays. There is even a monologue book called, believe it or not, "Monologues They Haven't Heard". Well, within a short time after that book came out, we certainly HAD heard all those monologues, and were sick of them. If you see a monologue you like in a monologue book, you should assume that hundreds, thousands of other actors have also read a copy of that monologue book, seen the same monologue and have decided to use that monologue!
It might make more sense, when you see a monologue you like in a monologue book, to use that as a starting point and go and read other plays by the same playwright. You should be able to find a lesser known play by a playwright you like, and find a monologue just as good as the one in the monologue book.
When you are choosing a monologue, you need to remember that the auditors are evaluating you on your ability to play a character. So make sure you choose a monologue that allows you to do this. This is not [just] a speech competition, don't choose a monologue simply because you like the words or the ideas in the monologue, choose the monologue because you are interested in the character and would like to play him or her. The best monologues are the ones in which the character goes through some sort of internal journey over the course of the monologue.
That's enough to think about for now, part 2 of this discussion will be coming soon!
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