Contemporary vs. Modern monologues

TheRealKEVP
Tue, 13 Nov 2012 09:41:49 +0000

Can anyone give me an example of a school that specifically asks for a “modern” monologue, using that word “modern”? I don’t think there is one.

What your coach said was that “ideally” a contemporary monologue should be from a play written in the last ten years.

A contemporary monologue should just be one written in contemporary language. There is no clear line to say when “contemporary language” started. But the closer you get to right now, the greater the chance that your monologue will qualify as “contemporary”, and the older the monologue the greater the chance that it is “not contemporary”. A monologue written in the last ten years is almost certainly going to be in contemporary language, but the further back from there you go, the greater the likelihood that it isn’t.

But I wouldn’t say that there is no such thing as a contemporary monologue older than ten years! Just be careful what you choose. Read the monologue and ask yourself “Is this contemporary speech? Is this the way people talk right now, today, or is it a way people used to talk in the past?”

Yes, the trend in contemporary theatre is to deal with real issues and speak the way real people speak. This does mean that contemporary monologues often have swear words in them, because that is actually how real people speak today. And they often deal with very sensitive issues. The auditors may well be wanting to see how their applicants deal with these things.

(My mother was an officer in the organization called “National Society of Arts and Letters”. Every year they would give a contest for young people in a different art. So every four or five years it would be an acting contest. The young people (mostly college undergrads) would deliver two monologues, one classical, one contemporary. Some of these ladies who were members of the NSAL complained about the language in some of the contemporary monologues. But my mom was educated enough to know that the classical monologues were just the same, just the words have changed.)

I do remember a friend of mine auditioning for colleges switching his monologue to a more recently written one because he was told that his “contemporary” monologue was too old to be contemporary.