Saturday, July 23, 2016
The Monologue Parity Project: How and Why I Decided to Tackle the Issue of Parity in Modern Theatre
HowlRound: I distinctly remember the experience of searching for my first monologue. I was fourteen and a freshman in high school, desperately looking for the first solo piece I would ever perform. It had to be perfect and truly me—an exciting hunt that triggered the familiar palm-tingling sensation I experienced whenever I had the distinct feeling of possibility. I call it my sixth sense for the theatrical world. My palms start to tingle whenever I see the curtain rise on a new play, and I know it’s a good one if they still tingle after it ends.
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2 comments:
It is important that young actors and actresses are able to find material they can relate to. It is disheartening to find that most monologues are not targeted at teenagers, and when they are, many of them only deal with surface level topics. This project is a nice idea. It takes submitted stories and allows people to write monologues based off of them. The idea is good in theory, but less so in reality. Since anyone can write and submit the monologues, the quality is often not what one might hope for. Also, the subject matter remains largely surface level, regardless of how moving the original story might have been. Monologues are most frequently used as audition material, and most audition panels hope that actors select monologues from plays. So, in a practical sense, these monologues would prove useless in an audition setting, simply because they are not from plays.
This project is so interesting. Posting personal stories and then having others read them and turn them into art is an amazing way to tell your personal life story or experience, then have your story inspire others to create art, and then in turn inspire you with the art the other created. It’s just an amazing idea. The point that was made in the article about certain groups, in this case “young bisexual female”, not being represented onstage brought one topic into my head: is theater really diversifying? Recently there is so much talk about the theater being so diverse because of this year’s Tony winners. The fact that theater is diversifying in its actors is true; just look at the cast of Hamilton. But, is the content of theater actually diversifying? This author made the point that certain groups aren’t being represented in theatrical literature, especially the literature available to high school students. And I think that this is a sad truth. It is sad that there are high school students who are looking to theater to identify with a character, but are unable to find one that reflects their true self. This poses the issue of diversity in content of theater. I think that this is the next issue that the theater community should tackle. We should start writing about topics that effect all people and creating characters about the people who aren’t represented right now on stage; that would truly be diversifying theater.
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