Tips for Choosing a Monologue

The call comes and you have twenty-four hours to get into the audition room with the company or director you have been itching to work with. You've got nothing prepared — not one line, not even a shortlist. You spend the night reading or calling everyone you know for suggestions, and you spend the morning panicking and learning lines, and the afternoon performing something you do not fully understand yet. And then you leave the audition kicking yourself. Sound familiar?

If you've been in that situation, hopefully the experience taught you something that you will never forget: a monologue is not a document you prepare for an occasion. It is something you carry. Something that you have become so comfortable with that you could perform it in your sleep. The actor who has a piece already living in them — worked on, questioned, revised, genuinely inhabited — is living as an actor should. They are present in the audition rather than appearing effortful. They are playing authentically rather than displaying the act of surviving.

At minimum, every working actor needs to have at least two pieces living in them and ready at any given time — one contemporary, one classical or period. I believe you need to have three to five pieces covering - drama, comedy, and period.  And actors  must actively refresh them as their craft develops and as they change - physically and mentally. 

I've documented the following tips to help you choose something worth carrying. Not just for the next audition. For the long run.  I have not invented these tips and I do not claim to be the ‘author’ of them. These tips are derived from and generally recognised by some of the greats: Michael Shurtleff, Konstantin Stanislavski, Sanford Meisner, Peter Brook, Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenburg, Uta Hagen, Grotowski.

The tips in this article are for the long game — for building your stock of monologues, for choosing well, and giving the work the time it needs. They do not speak to the rushed self-tape, the last-minute turnaround, the material that arrives with no warning and a tight deadline. That is the unfortunate reality of the industry right now. It is also, quite frankly, a whole separate problem for the contemporary actor.

If you feel that this is a lot of work, then you're right. But thats what being an actor is. Remember, the only shortcut is the long road.

Know what the monologue is for

Before you choose anything, ask yourself one question: what is this for? The monologue you perform in a professional audition is not the same as the one you bring to a showcase, a class, or an evening of monologues. Each context has different rules and a different audience. In an audition, the panel needs to understand what you are doing within thirty seconds — clarity and legibility come first. In a showcase, you have more room to take risks. In a class, you are allowed to fail. In an evening of monologues, you are performing for an audience who came for an evening out, not to watch an actor develop. The right piece in the wrong room is still the wrong piece. Know the context before you choose.

Play your actual age and type

A piece that excites you because it is nothing like you is almost certainly the wrong piece. A monologue shows what you can do…now, not what you hope to become. Age matters. Type matters. A twenty-year-old playing fifty reads as an actor disconnected, it does not read as being ambitious for the role. A character whose class, culture, or life experience sits miles away from your own asks a panel to use their imagination and close the gap. This does not mean every character must mirror your life biography 100%— it means the overlap has to be real enough that the panel believes you in the circumstances. Choose a character whose life plausibly touches your own. Find a piece that needs exactly what you have.

The character must want something specific

Feeling is not action and a panel needs to see you in action. A character who is sad, or angry, or confused gives an emotional weather report — not a dramatic situation. Drama is built on want. Your character must be trying to do something to someone in that room, even if the room is empty and the someone is a memory. The want does not have to be grand. It does not have to be a life-or-death situation. But it has to be specific enough that every line has a direction. Ask yourself: what does this character need by the end of this speech that they do not have at the beginning? If you cannot answer that in one sentence, the piece is wrong or not ready — or you are not.

Avoid the warhorses

Many pieces have been performed so many times that they arrive pre-judged. Of course it is tempting to tackle the greats because, well, they are generally superb writing but the panel has seen seventeen versions of this speech today and will most likely see three more. No matter how well you do it, you are fighting an uphill battle against accumulated boredom. This is not a comment on the quality of your acting skills, It is a comment on saturation. The pieces that float to the top of drama school and audition circuits tend to flatten the imagination of anyone sitting on the other side of the table. Your job is to make them lean forward. You cannot do that with a piece they have already switched off from.

Read the whole play

This is not optional. It is not a nice idea. It is the minimum requirement for calling yourself prepared. The character you are playing exists in a world — a specific world with a specific set of circumstances, relationships, and pressures that led them to this moment. Two minutes of text does not give you that world. The whole play does. Reading the whole play also protects you. The moment a panel asks about the scene before, or the character being addressed, or what happens at the end, and you cannot answer — everything you built in those two minutes collapses. Read the play. It takes a couple of hours and some well earned time away from your phone. Do it.

Shorter is better

Unless you have been specifically asked for a longer piece, two minutes is your ceiling. The reason is not that the panel does not have time — though often they don't. The reason is that a shorter piece forces discipline. There is nowhere to hide in 120 seconds. Every moment must earn its place. A longer piece invites padding, and padding is where weak acting lives. The longer you go, the more rope you hand the panel to find the moment you lose them. A tight, precise two-minute piece that lands clean is worth more than a four-minute showcase that loses the room in the middle. If you are in love with a longer piece, cut it down to suit your purposes.

Find something they haven't seen this week

Originality is definitely a competitive advantage. New writing is published constantly. Theatre from other countries and traditions exists in translation and is largely untouched by the audition circuit. Panels remember actors who brought them something new — not because novelty is the point, but because something unfamiliar demands full attention. They have to actually watch. It sometimes allows the added bonus for a discussion about the play which gives you more opportunity to show yourself

The monologue should reveal character, not narrate plot

If the first half of your piece is the character explaining what happened and how we got here, it is doing the playwright's work rather than the actor's. A monologue should be a window into a person, not a summary of the pl;ays events.  Find a piece where something is being revealed — where the character shows us more than they mean to, more than the words on the surface are saying.That is where acting lives.

Trust your gut only after you've done the work

Your gut is a useful guide — but only once it has something to work with. The actor who grabs the first piece that excites them has not found the right piece; they have found the first piece. Read widely. Read plays you would never normally choose. Read outside your comfort zone, your period, your culture. Then, when something stops you on a page and will not let you move on, that instinct has real weight behind it. The piece you choose after reading twenty plays is a different kind of choice to the one you make after reading two. Trust your gut. But feed it first.

Choose a character who is active, not reactive

There are two kinds of characters in a monologue: ones who are responding to what has already happened, and ones who are trying to make something happen right now. Choose the second kind. The best monologues have urgency — the character is not describing their situation, they are trying to change it. They push, persuade, confess, demand. When you perform a piece built on feeling, you perform the emotion. When you perform a piece built on action, you perform the action. Action is more compelling to watch. Find a character who is doing something, not just feeling something.

Check the tone matches the room

A dark piece in a comedy audition is a gamble that rarely pays. Not because darkness is wrong — it is not — but because you are asking the panel to shift their entire thinking to accommodate you, and panels deep in an audition day do not have the headspace for it. Know the tone of what you are auditioning for and definitely know the genre. Know the tone of the company, the director, the venue. If the production values lightness, bring a piece that lives in that register — and then be brilliant inside it. Knowing the room you are standing in is not a compromise. It is how professionals work. Get it wrong and the piece works against you before you have said a word.

Avoid illness as the main event

If the most interesting thing about the character is that they are unwell, keep looking. There is nothing wrong with playing someone who is sick or even mentally ill — the problem is when an actor uses it as a performance shortcut. The piece becomes a kind of acting ‘costume’ that substitutes for genuine specificity. Great plays that deal with illness ground their characters in full humanity, not in their condition. If you are drawn to a piece of this kind, ask yourself honestly: are you drawn to the character, or to the performance opportunity? If it is the latter, the piece will not service you and visa versa.

The opening line must do work

Arguably, you have approximately ten seconds before a panel has formed a view of you. The first line of your monologue is either a door to go through or a wall that stops the panel. If it opens something — a question, a tension, a situation already in motion — they will follow you through. If it is only scene-setting, context-giving, or a slow build to something that might eventually be interesting, you have most likely already lost them. Here's a good trick - When choosing your piece, read the first line aloud in an empty room. Ask yourself: does this demand to be heard? If it does not, find the line in the piece that does. Start there.

Don't confuse difficulty with quality

A difficult or over complex piece done adequately is worse than a simple piece done brilliantly. Actors who choose a technically demanding monologue to demonstrate range, and deliver it at seventy percent, have demonstrated nothing except poor judgement. The actor who finds a deceptively simple piece and plays it with absolute precision and genuine presence is the one the panel remembers. Difficulty is not seriousness. Ease is not laziness. Choose what you can actually do at your best.

Make sure you can play the whole arc in the time

A monologue with no shift, no turn, no change is just a speech. Something must change in the character across the duration of the piece — their understanding deepens or collapses, their determination hardens or breaks. And that change must be completable within your time limit. A two-minute piece that builds towards a moment it cannot reach is broken before you begin. Check that the material gives you enough room to start somewhere and end somewhere different. If the piece is one note throughout, you have done yourself a great disservice.

Period language requires period understanding

Classical work requires specific preparation. The language of an earlier era carries rhythms, grammar, and a social world that do not work the way modern speech does. If you do not understand how heightened text works, you will often destroy its rhythm. If you do not understand the world the character lives in, you will make choices that do not fit and are basically wrong. This is not about being an academic. It is about doing the research that this specific language demands. It’s your job. If you are not prepared to do that work, choose a contemporary piece and do it properly. If the production you are auditioning for is a period piece, you’d be mad to not do the work and if you're not prepared to do the work, just don’t bother auditioning.

Avoid pieces written for a star 

If everyone in the room has already seen someone else in the role that you are using in a monologue, you have possibly lost before you start. Some pieces are so associated with a particular actor — a definitive stage performance, a celebrated film version, a cultural moment — that they carry a ghost into the room with you. The panel cannot help but compare - they are human after all. You are no longer playing the character. You are playing the character against someone else's indelible version of it, and you will come off worse. Find material where there is no ghost in the room. Where what you bring is the only version that exists.

Every monologue is addressed to someone. 

Even if that person is absent — dead, gone, imagined — the speech should be aimed at them with precision. When an actor loses this, the monologue turns inward and becomes a character talking about themselves to no one in particular. That can be exhausting to watch. Placing a specific, imagined person in a specific spot in the room gives the speech direction. It gives your eyes somewhere to be. It gives the words a destination. Without that, you are performing into empty air. With it, every word has a target.

Be very careful of using a panel member as a focus of your monologue. I personally do not like it at all as it requires me to be supportive. A panel wants to observe, not be a scene partner.

Let it live before you lock it

Believe me, a monologue chosen last week is not ready. Inhabiting a piece takes time that cannot be rushed — time to sit with the character in quiet moments, to hear the language in your head before you sleep, to find yourself thinking about the situation without trying to. Actors who lock a piece too early give performances that are technically correct but feel closed off. Something has been decided before it was fully discovered. The piece you have been living with long enough that it still occasionally surprises you — that is the one that is ready. Give it time. Then trust it.

Consider editing from a scene

Some of the best monologues I've seen are not found in the text as a single block of speech. They have been assembled by the actor. A character may carry a scene through a series of exchanges. The character is pursuing the same objective, responding to the same person, across several pages.  Re-shaping a scene into a monologue takes editorial skill and a willingness to do the work. You need to understand the scene well enough to know what belongs and what only served a theatrical moment. But when it works, the result is something the panel has never seen — because it never existed as a single piece until you made it.

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Do not work on your monologues alone. Find colleagues who are also preparing monologues and work together — read together, run pieces for each other, give notes, be an audience for one another.  And be generous!  If you find a piece that is wrong for you but right for someone else, pass it on. The generosity will come back around. why not start a monologue club and meet regularly. This is called the actors work.

PERFORM! Performing your monologue for friends and colleagues as often as possible does two things: it takes the edge off performance anxiety, and it tells you quickly whether the piece is actually landing. You do not want the panel to be the first audience your monologue has.

The reality is, most panels don’t care about the piece you choose to present. What they care about is you and your humanity and whether you are suitable for a role or ensemble they are casting. That is why, for you, your choice of piece is so important. The biggest tip of all is - Be you. Be authentic. Don’t try and second guess the director or panel. You at your most authentic could be exactly what they are looking for and your choice of monologue can reflect this.

Remember this above everything else: the panel or director on the other side of that door is not waiting for you to fail. They want you to be the one. Every time someone walks in, they are hoping that this is the actor they have been looking for. Walk in and give them a reason to stop looking.

These sites are free and worth your time looking through.

Backstage

Backstage is one of the top resource for acting monologues 

Stage Partners

Every monologue links to its full play, readable online.

StageMilk

Australian. Free original short monologues, regularly updated, with script analysis notes alongside each piece.

Daily Actor

Large free contemporary library.

Monologue Blogger

Original plays, searchable archive, drama and comedy. Material you are unlikely to have encountered before.

Instant Monologues

150 free printable pieces — classical public domain and contemporary original. No royalties, no licensing.

Freedrama

Free original monologues by D.M. Larson. Short and long pieces, usable for auditions, class work, and self-tape.