1-Sentence Summary: After realizing that she and her date (a mathematician) are not a good match, Sara explains to her date that while she's not interested in him as a person she was planning to get laid so can they cut the boring and tedious small talk and skip to the pleasurable part of the evening?

Appreciated: Depiction of a strong outspoken woman who knows what she wants and owns her sexuality unabashedly.

Age Range 20's
​Character's gender is female.
Monologue genre is comedic.
Find this monologue in the collection of short plays "Plays for Three" in the play "Sex with a Mathematician" by Pete Barry.
Monologue starts with the line "Listen, Shirty" and ends with "Let's skip the torture and jump right to the pleasure. (Sizes him up) In whatever quantities we can get it."

​Monologue Writing 101 Elements (0 = Not Used. 1 = Used. 2 = Strong Usage)
​1. Strong Want - 1. To get laid.
2. High Stakes - 0.5
3. Tactical Variety - 2. To break the stigma of casual sex "we're just mammals." To get him to own up to how bad the internet dating service screwed up. To set herself apart from how most women she (and likely he) knows and why she love vets by different rules. All tactics serve to sell him on the idea.
4. Hook Opener - 2. Two words grab attention, show spunk, and establish her character's persona fast. Unique word choice "Shirty."
5. Button Finish - 2. Gives the actress an active reaction to play as she sizes he guy up. Comic gold potentially here. Try different deliveries with colleagues! Humor comes from the honest emotional moment. So what genuine reaction to the guy might someone be having that would make you giggle if you witnessed it?
6. Sensory - 0
7. Internal Obstacles - 0
8. Past/Present Balance - 0. All present action here. That's a good thing! (IF a monologue is a rememberence then it must be connected to and furthering the active present moment in some way).
9. Discovery - 1. If Sara doesn't know she's going to be so blunt (until the moment she is) it will have more power than if she had planned to say it or this is a shtick she uses frequently.
10. Restraint - 1. Understanding the moment before a monologue is key here. If Sara was biting her tongue and suffering inside the whole date until this moment, then she's been restraining her frustration until this moment when she releases it. This monologue is in part fantasy fulfillment. The thing we wish we were brave enough to come out and say. Sara likely feeling no liberated as she blows past the normal human fear of hurting the person she's with to being brutally honest.
TOTAL "ELEMENT USAGE WEIGHT": 9.5

Loved this one!

Tags: Comedic female monologues, Comedic monologues for women, Womens monologues, Audition monologues for women, Contemporary monologues, Modern monologues, Monologues from published plays, comedy monologues, comedic monologues, funny monologues, humorous monologues, 1 minute monologues, hilarious monologues, monologues for young women, strong outspoken female characters, sassy monologues, monologues about dating.

1-Sentence Summary: A frustrated video store employee who just quit her job at Galaxy Video begs for it back.

Appreciated: Love the journey she takes, from struggling with the fact that she hates people (especially video store customers who ask dumb questions and put videos back in the wrong sections), looking inward to find out why (she can do that, look inward, because she "takes Yoga"), going to her and therapist to explore deeper, to realize it's because she's a talented stick figure artist. She draws stick figures!

Age Range 20's to 30's.
​Character's gender is female.
Monologue genre is comedic.
Find this monologue on page 44 of "222 Comedy Monologues: 2 Minutes and Under."

​Monologue Writing 101 Elements (0 = Not Used. 1 = Used. 2 = Strong Usage)
​1. Strong Want - 1
2. High Stakes - 0.5
3. Tactical Variety - 0
4. Hook Opener - 0.5
5. Button Finish - 1
6. Sensory - 0.5
7. Internal Obstacles - 2
8. Past/Present Balance - 2
9. Discovery - 1
10. Restraint - 1
TOTAL "ELEMENT USAGE WEIGHT": 9.5

Loved this monologue!

Tags: Comedic female monologues, Comedic monologues for women, Womens monologues, Audition monologues for women, Contemporary monologues, Modern monologues, Monologues from published plays, comedy monologues, comedic monologues, funny monologues, humorous monologues, 2 minute monologues.

David Ives is the master of the short form play in our lifetime.  No one in the short form is as widely produced or as well known even outside the world of theatre people.  His published plays can be found in nearly every drama school library. His writing is light like a souffle, witty, warm and wise.   And yes, he's a Yale MFA grad like Durang perhaps the other darker more emotionally raw short form genius who also holds a Pulitzer.  But this post is about Ives.  If Durang is deep, painful cathartic comedy, Ives is the light brilliant uplifting counterpoint.  In any event, both write comedy, a thing perhaps too little celebrated in a life that is made infinitely better by the presence of laughter.

Alright then, the actual topic of this post, David Ives "The Green Hill."   It' a short play about a man, Jake, who everyday imagines himself if only for a few minutes atop a green hill.  The hill is a place where he is perfectly happy and at peace.  He is obsessed with finding the actual green hill.  He knows it is not just in his mind.  He goes on a journey perhaps leaving the love of his life, Sandy, behind to chase down the hill.  He discovers the hill is real when he finds a picture of it at a travel agency.  He gets the name of the late photographer and asks the photographer's wife, where is this hill?  She doesn't know!  The photographer spent his life taking pictures of green hills and didn't label where any of them were located!  However, there was a lot of everywhere he'd travelled.  So our hero Jake sets out to go to every place this photographer went in search of the hill.   

The peak of dramatic tension and the cathartic moment of realization by Jake that he no longer needs to find the hill.  He is ready to go home.  At that moment when his dream is lost, he discovers the hill.  This is the best suited moment to derive a monologue.  You will have to make some cuts to make it work, but the derived monologue works and gives you a sense of defeat and then elation to play.  And the entire play is short, a ten minute play, so read the entire thing to understand where Jake is emotionally at this moment.

Start the monologue with the line "Hill 16,973.  Every American I meet I ask for Sandy."  Skip right to "I figure Sandy's long married .. " and after "as flat as a starched bedsheet" jump to "Suddenly I can't remember what the hill I'm looking for looks like ... " and after "I'm nowhere inside my head or out of it" jump to "It's time to go home" and then to "Help a guy out?" and continue with text as-is all the way until the final line you'll end on "I've never felt so free in my life."

Get the play ​The Green Hill by David Ives here.  The monologue is derived from pages 198-200. 

Monologue for a young man. Hook opener "I'm Ben. I'm pretty stupid. I'm not going to a fancy college like you. I'm a third-tier kind of person." and closes on "...more than selfish discontent." Romantic comedy monologue of an earnest guy trying to talk his way into a woman's heart.

From page 195-196 of "Shorter Faster Funnier"

Monologue for a man, comedic.  Character is described as "an older man" named Gaston.   The play "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" is by Steve Martin.

This monologue gives an actor a nice balance of past and present action to play.  The present action is the character's desire to understand from Picasso what it's like to come up with ideas, to be creative, to have inspiration.  He yearns to know what it must be like to be inspired; an original.  Then he recounts a failed attempt in his own life to come up with an idea to pain something: the shutters on his house.  The story he tells is actually really heart wrenching but comedically so, and the problem of coming up with an idea for the color to paint his shutters gets bigger and bigger until he actually considers taking his own life!  Finally, he decides to paint them green.  All the huge struggle over something so seemingly simple and relatively mundane/inconsequential both gives an actor a great intense journey to play, and because of the absurdity be pretty funny too.  The build of the problem is like Henri Bergson's "Snowball" effect described in his famous essay on comedy "Laughter."   As an actor you get to play all the great angst and struggle and desperation (past action) while using it as a way to convey to Picasso in right now how much you'd like to understand his process (present action).  So you've got both a big emotional ride and a strong want/objective to pursue.

Monologue starts with the line "Well, you're a painter; you're always having to come up with ideas.  What's it like?"  and ends with the line "But then one day I said to myself 'Green' and that was it."  Find it on page 55 of "Picasso at the Lapin Agile and other plays."  Get the play here. 

Monologue for a woman. Comedic. 1 to 2 minutes performed. Character is Paige.

Hook opening line "The invisible guest. No dinner party is complete without one." Paige goes onto explain how she feels Jesus would be a "thrilling dinner guest."

To perform in audition cut the interjections by Lars, Hal, Sian. End on the line "We'd all get indigestion."

Comedic monologue for a woman.  Character is an artist named Wynne.   In this funny monologue from Moira Buffini's play "Dinner" which was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2003.

Attention grabbing opening line "He's never forgiven me for - It was when I put my portrait of his genitals in my exhibition."   If the auditors aren't paying attention after that line, check them for a pulse.   The monologue goes onto detail Wynne's back and forth tete-a-tete.  Each line she recreates for us, enacting both sides of the interaction, is a tactic by herself against him to justify her actions and maintain the upper hand.  The last line she reports, his triumphant victory over her, as he justifies his infidelity based on her cruelty.  So we go from a feeling from Wynne of slight "duping delight" and dominance to crushed, saddened, a little depressed.  Deflated.   Ergo, as an actress you get a few tactics to play, a funny banter to re-enact (chance to play a guy's voice and be silly as you enact his side of the convo), and an emotional journey.  Not bad and it can be done in under 2 minutes.   

​Preview the monologue on google books here.   The monologue starts on page 10 of the play "Dinner" with the line "He's never forgiven me for" and ends with the line "He was triumphant" on the same page.  Get the play here.

Monologue for a middle aged woman, comedy.  Character, Wanda, is described as "Older professional woman. Warm but not inclined to suffer fools."

Monologue has hook opening "We are living in an insane world" and goes on to explore how Wanda used to have a dream about her "crazy" grandmother, who believed money should not be trusted with banks but kept in false bottom shoes.  In Wanda's dream she'd introduce her grandma to financial journalist Kai Ryssdal of NPRs Marketplace to talk some sense into her about putting her money into banks.  However, post financial crisis with her own home in danger of being taken back by the banks, Wanda still has a dream of her grandma meeting Kai, but now its so she could watch her grandma slap him across his face.   

​You can find the monologue on page 308 of ​Humana Festival 2012: The Complete Plays.