Hello everyone,
Here is a monologue from a play called Key Exchange by Kevin Wade. It’s a wonderful monologue and I recently worked on it and shot it for The Actors Process $5000 Scholarship. Yes I am terrified linking to my video on this page but why not?
My advice – a great pitfall with this monologue is that actors will often try to play the sadness. In life we never try to be sad (unless we want something!). We always tell our stories for a reason. People can talk about the most horrible thing that ever happened to them while smiling or trying not to cry. I tried to focus on what I wanted to communicate in the here and now rather than trying to show that I could cry. If tears come, great. If they don’t, just know that in life we can tell a story and laugh about it one day and we can tell the same story and cry the next. Emotions are funny like that.
LISA:
When I was very young, my mother got cancer, and it had spread too far by the time they diagnosed it to do anything but let her die. For about six months she lay in the terminal ward at Sloan-Kettering. When she first went in, she told my father that her only wish was to see her family grow up, but that that was impossible, so to kiss her goodbye and leave and don’t hang on for this bumpy ride, as she put it. But the most important thing in the world to my father was that she have her last wish, so he left his job, sold the house, moved us into the city, went through miles of red tape, and arranged for a permit to build a sandbox and a swing next to the parking lot outside her window, where she could see us. And every day that Summer, and after school and on weekends that fall, he would take me and brother there, and we would play, and when my brother asked ‘Why here?’ my father said that Mom was in heaven, but she had a good view of that particular sandbox. My aunt told me that story when I first started going out with boys. She said “What your father did for your mother, Lisa, that is love. Be smart, Lisa. Save your honor for the man who loves you.” It was a long time before I could even give a decent kiss without somewhere asking myself whether or not this guy would stand outside my window for six months while I died.
The Seeing Space 