The Flick by Annie Baker

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

Happy Halloween!

[weird quippy one-liner about my opening]. Anyway. I’m not doing a spooky/Halloween themed  play this week or anything like that, unfortunately.  BUT, I am going to do something super current. Last week I went and saw a play at The Barrow Street Theatre, and I fell in love with it. It’s a new play, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2014, and the playwright is currently a Playwright in Residence at Signature Theatre, which is kind of a big deal.

This week I present to you:

THE FLICK

by Annie Baker

The play is about three people who work in a movie theatre in Massachusettes, one of those old, tacky-colored, one-screen deals that’s kind of faded out with the advent of multiplex movie theatre monopolies like Regal and AMC and Cinemark and the necessity for 3D technology. Sam is a 35-year old theatre usher with very little upward potential. At the outset of the play he’s training Avery, a college-on-hold student with an almost fanatic knowledge and love of movies. Rose is a 24-year old sloppy, vocal-fry narcissist running the old 35-mm film projector up in the booth. Sam is quietly in love with Rose, Avery is quietly depressed, and Rose is oblivious to both of them outside of their intersection with her life. Sam and Rose explain to a reluctant Avery the concept of “dinner money” which is essentially money they steal from the oblivious owner of the theatre and divide equally amongst themselves as complicit employees. Avery agrees. Sam goes away to his brother’s wedding for a weekend, and Rose and Avery have a malfunctional fling. Sam returns, senses something is different, and feels betrayed. The owner of the theatre sells it to a new owner who’s going to replace the film projector with a digital one. The new owner discovers “dinner money” and threatens to fire Avery, who doesn’t rat on his new friends, but asks them to stand up for him and admit their own guilt. They refuse, and he recites Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction (in his opinion the last great American movie ever made) before leaving. In the next scene, we see a new employee, Skylar, who’s replacing Avery from a multiplex nearby. Avery stops by later to pick up the replaced film projector that Sam has saved for him, and tells Sam that what he discovered while working there is that he shouldn’t expect everything to turn out well in the end, anyway.

It’s kind of a hard play to describe.

Annie Baker has a very specific style, which (I’m making this up but) I can only describe as Exacerbated Realism: as audience members, we spend a lot of the time watching these characters be human and do pointedly un-dramatic things - like spot-sweep popcorn off the floor of a movie theatre - in silence. Acting Annie Baker is like living in an uncomfortable dinner party -- lots of long moments between dialogue where everyone stares at their plate while trying to think of a way to say what’s on their mind. It’s weird. This one more than most I really recommend you watch the recording I have of it, to get a sense of the pacing.

We are, of course, looking at

ROSE

In this monologue (or, sort of monologue… I’ve once again spliced the shit out of a scene to make into a reasonable piece), Rose is talking to Avery after that “malfunctional fling” I described in the summary. They decided to put in an old movie after hours on the projector the weekend that Sam is out of town, and as they sat in the empty theatre, Rose gave the unresponsive Avery a non-unexpected-but-still-surprising handjob until his lack of response pulled her back. She ran upstairs, turned the movie off, and is now sitting on the other side of the theatre, confronting the weirdness that just happened.

(a long silence)
ROSE: Sorry.

AVERY: No.

    I’m sorry.

    (short pause)

    Oh my god.

    I wanna kill myself.

ROSE: Wow.

    Thanks.

(Avery removes his face from his hands and looks at Rose. another long silence)

ROSE: I um…

    Yeah.

    Wow.

    Can we just forget that this ever happened, okay?

    (pause)

    I feel like I molested you or something.

AVERY: You didn’t molest me.

ROSE: Yeah.

    I’m an idiot.

    (a short pause)

    Honestly I don’t even know why I like did that.

    I wasn’t planning on doing that.

    I swear to god.

    (a short pause)

    There’s something wrong with me.

AVERY: No, there’s something wrong with me.

(a long silence)

ROSE: Well are we just going to sit here and like freak out together in silence?

    Because then I’d/rather

AVERY: It’s just.

    This has happened to me.

    Before.

(pause)

So don’t feel - please don’t feel/like-

ROSE: Yeah, but you weren’t giving me the vibe and I went for it anyway.

(a long pause)

    … So you-like --

AVERY: I just have a hard time.

    Sometimes.

    When like - my mind goes blank and I like…

    I always just think: I’d rather be watching a movie.

(his elbows go onto his knees and his face goes into his hands again)

ROSE: It’s okay, Avery.

(she moves across the room and sits next to him again)

    What do you think about when you, like, fantasize?

    (no response. after a pause:)

    Do you ever think about/guys?

AVERY: I really don’t want to answer these questions.

ROSE: Okay.

    That’s okay.

(his face is still in his hands. Rose leans back in her seat, almost relaxed now, and props her feet up on the seat in front of her)

    Well, I’m fucked up too.

AVERY: (muffled) Yeah?

    (short pause)

ROSE: I can’t stay attracted to anyone longer than four months.

AVERY: … Huh.

ROSE: At first I’m like this crazy nymphomaniac. All I want to do is like have sex all the time. Like eight, nine times a day.

AVERY: Whoa

ROSE: And then it like totally goes away and I turn into a like this like dead fish.

    And then I fake it til we break up.

AVERY: Huh.

    (a long pause)

ROSE: And you know what’s even weirder?

AVERY: What.

ROSE: When I like fantasize I just like think about myself

    (a short pause)

AVERY: Really?

ROSE: Yeah. Like everyone else is totally blurry except for me.

    I’m like totally in focus.

    And I like look amazing.

    And everyone is like: holy shit.

    That girl looks so amazing.

    (pause)

    It’s really embarrassing.

(skip forward through Avery having a monologue about wanting to kill himself…)

ROSE: This is an awesome conversation.

SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT THE PAUSES?!

The play itself is three hours long.

Three.

(a long pause)

Hours.

But it IS an incredible acting opportunity, just because the style is specific, so I decided to give it a shot. At the very least, check out Annie Baker and her plays, others of which include Circle Mirror Transformation (my personal favorite) and Aliens. And as always, buy/read the play before you do the monologue and post what you come up with here! We’d love to see it!

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!

This Is Our Youth -- Kenneth Lonergan

HI.

IT’S SHANNON.

You know that monologue you have that’s your fallback? That piece that you could probably do backwards because it’s been through like 40 auditions with you and you keep using it even though you tell yourself “I really need to get a new one” of these? (Which is probably why you’re on this site, let’s be honest) You know that one? This one’s mine. Which is kind of cheating but it’s a great young-adult contemporary female monologue which are few and far between, so… fuck it? Let’s go.

THIS IS OUR YOUTH

by Kenneth Lonergan

The play is about Warren Straub, an Upper West Side white kid struggling to figure out how to struggle against a system that has given him everything… in 1982. At the opening of the play, Warren buzzes his way into Dennis ‘Too-Cool-For-You-And-School’ Ziegler’s apartment. He’s just stolen $20,000 from his dad, packed up his prized toy collection, and made a run for it. Dennis convinces him to loan him a large part of the money for a drug-dealing scheme involving several thousand dollars worth of cocaine (it is the 80s, after all) and a night of high living for himself, Warren, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s friend Jessica, who Warren’s been crushing on. He and Dennis argue, smoke up (marijuana), and await the girls’ arrival. Before the girls get there, Dennis leaves to go buy the cocaine needed for their scheme. While he’s gone, Jessica arrives, without Valerie and edgy about being set up with Warren. She and Warren start to talk, bond over Warren’s antique toy collection, and Warren proposes that they make a night of it -- go to a fancy hotel, get some room service, and have sex until the sun rises. Jessica agrees, and they leave. End Act One. Act Two starts up the next day with Dennis pouncing down Warren’s throat for leaving, and then Jessica arrives, senses that Dennis knows about what happened between her and Warren the night previous, and confronts Warren about it as soon as Dennis leaves. He admits to telling Dennis, and Jessica is upset. To make it up to her he offers a gift and she asks for his most prized possession: his grandfather’s baseball cap. He consents (sort of to spite her “just kidding” response), she returns it, and leaves. He spills the cocaine Dennis had bought the previous night, and Dennis comes back in, not even upset about the cocaine because a man named Stuey, who had been living their same lifestyle, had died of a drug overdose and he’s in shock.

And that’s the end of the play. It’s very colloquial, everyone is very articulate and talks very fast and has a lot of opinions about everything that happens. Warren is awkward (played by Michael Cera in the recent Broadway production, for example), Dennis is domineering, and Jessica is high-strung.

We’re looking at

JESSICA

In this scene, Jessica has returned to see Warren: it’s the morning after they had sex, and she’s feeling insecure about it. When she arrives, Dennis lets on that he knows something, and as soon as he leaves, Jessica freaks out on Warren and confronts him for telling Dennis about their night together. She’s perturbed because she told Valerie that they hadn’t had sex and doesn’t want to lose her tenuous friendship.

WARREN: No! Will you just let me finish my-

JESSICA: (on ‘let’) But honestly, Warren? I don’t really care who you told, or what you told them, because peope are gonna think whatever they’re gonna think and you know what? There’s nothing I can do about it.

WARREN: What people? What are you talking about?

JESSICA: I don’t know, but whatever it is I must be wrong because of the way you’re yelling.

WARREN: You’re not anything!

JESSICA: Well, it really -- I should just really learn to listen to my instincts, you know? Because your instincts are never wrong. And it was totally against my instinct to come over here last night, and it was definitely against my instinct to sleep with you, but I did and now it’s too late. And now my Mom is totally furious with me, I probably ruined my friendship with Valerie, and now like Dennis Ziegler thinks I’m, like, easy pickins, or something --!

WARREN: Nobody thinks anything --

JESSICA: And it’s not like I even care what he thinks, okay? Because I don’t actually know him. Or you. Or Valerie for that matter! So it doesn’t really matter! I’ve made new friends before and I can make more new friends now if I have to. So let’s just forget that the whole thing ever happened, you can chalk one up in your book or whatever --

WARREN: I don’t have a book.

JESSICA: -- and I’ll just know better next time! Hopefully. OK? (pause)

There you have it! Short, sweet, and to the point, and easy to pin an objective to -- a little different from the four-minute tirades we’ve been doing a lot of recently.

Remember to read the play and post a video of YOUR monologue if you end up choosing this piece! I highly recommend it -- it’s great to put you in that ‘teen’ spot, and has gotten me cast time and time again.

Once again, this has been
SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and

I’M SHANNON.

ENJOY!

All New People by Zach Braff

HI

IT’S SHANNON.

This week, we’re reading a play by Zach Braff -- yeah, that same Zach Braff we all know and love from Scrubs decided to pull a Jesse Eisenberg and wrote this play in 2011. It’s original production was at Second Stage Theatre, and it’s actually really, really good. Definitely a comedy.

It’s called:

ALL NEW PEOPLE

by Zach Braff

The play takes place in a Long Island beach home in winter. It opens with Charlie, who has come to the seclusion of the off-season location to hang himself only to be interrupted Emma, an English illegal alien working as a real estate agent. She has arrived in an attempt to sell the house to prospective buyers, but takes her intervention of Charlie’s suicide as a sign. Her best friend, a firefighter/drug dealer named Myron arrives, and as they pester Charlie about his decision, he tells them that the reason he is killing himself is because he himself has killed six people. Kim, a prostitute bought for Charlie’s his friend who owns the house, arrives and Myron flirts with her as one by one they each reveal what has brought them to this point in their lives: Emma was raped in England and has sworn to never return, Myron was fired from his job as a high school drama teacher for having sex with one of his students, and Charlie was an airport controller who killed six people when he got distracted at work. They muse over how fucked up life can be, and Kim tells the story of when she worked in a phone sex office, and a woman named Sensation comforted her once by telling her “in a hundred years, there will be all new people.”

It really is a comedy, I promise.

The monologue I’ll be doing is

(yet another character named)

EMMA

This is Emma’s entrance, essentially. She walks in, has discovered that Charlie is trying to kill himself, and has called him out on his activity, which he denies. She’s also super stoned. A British accent is required for this one -- the play doesn’t specify where exactly in England she’s from, though. Also the stakes of her going back to England are very high -- as I mention in the summary, she’s on the run from England because she was followed home and raped, so that reality underlies the beginning of the monologue.

So yeah! Here we go!

EMMA: Look, I don’t mean to be insensitive.

CHARLIE: Are you sure?

EMMA: I have no idea what’s going on with you or what your current situation is. It does seem a bit little like you might be trying to hang yourself with an extension cord, but I’m fully aware that things aren’t always what they seem. Book by its cover, blah, blah, blah. You very well may have been trying to... wire up some Christmas lights when you tripped and got all tangled up in that extension cord. But if I don’t rent a house for next summer soon, I’m gonna be fired and they’re gonna try to send me back to bloody fucking England because I don’t have a green card or a visa and there aren’t too many jobs I can get. I’m not gonna wipe anyone’s ass but my own and I’d make a horrible day-laborer; I’m running out of options. Pretty soon I’ll be right up there with you, accidentally hanging myself whilst merely trying to be festive. So would you please do a stranger a tiny kindness and allow me to attempt to rent your parents’ adorable little beach house to this nice Jewish couple from South Orange? (he stares at her a beat. gets down from the chair. lights a cigarette.)

CHARLIE: Go ahead.

EMMA: Thank you. (beat)

CHARLIE: Well, where are they?

EMMA: They’re not here yet. They said they were on their way. But they’re old and Jewish; it could be hours. They said they had to first pick up their grandson, Saul. Why Saul needs to come, I have no idea. Personally, I think they’re gonna try and set me up with him. With Saul: a dentist. A dentist who does community theater. Who the fuck would date a dentist!? A dentist wouldn’t date a dentist. He probably wears Les Miserables t-shirts to the gym. Do you mind if I have a drink? (Before he can answer she crosses to the bar and pours some whiskey in a glass.)

EMMA: I’m sorry, I’m being completely insensitive and bloody fucking selfish and self-centered. Horrible. I’m not a good person. I suck at being human; desperation has made me evil. It’s disgusting. So I apologize... New chapter: why were you trying to off yourself? And why hanging; it seems to be the most violent of all methods. Haven’t you any pills?

CHARLIE: I have pills.

EMMA: Really. What have you got?

CHARLIE: Xanax, Valium, Klonopin.

EMMA: Party, party, party. We could turn this day around for both of us real quick, couldn’t we? I’m just kidding. Well not really, but that’s irrelevant. Back to you? Girlfriend cheated? Lost it all in the market? Tired of hiding your love of cock? What put you over the edge?

CHARLIE: I really don’t wanna talk about it.

EMMA: Well, what’s the point in being coy about it now? If you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it,right? They always say that people who really wanna off themselves are gonna find a way. Well maybe God sent you me and the Goldberg’s for one last shot at talking you out of it. Don’t you believe in fate? I’m sorry, what’s your name?

CHARLIE:Charlie.

EMMA: Don’t you believe in fate, Charlie? Here you are, in an empty beach house, on a deserted island, in the middle of the fucking winter, moments away from ending it all, when in I walk. Does that give you no pause? Maybe God sent me to provide you with the some sort of... access to the doors of your mind that remain locked. (pause.) Sorry. I should tell you that I am super stoned right now. So if I say dumbass shit like “access to the doors of your mind that remain locked,” you have to forgive me. You have to give me a little “that poor girl is stoned outta her face” leeway.

Annndd that’s it. It’s a little long and can get kind of choppy -- Emma has another good monologue at the end of the play, where she describes why she can’t go back to England, but it’s a little melodramatic for an audition so I went with this one instead. Kim also has a good one (if you’re the superhot model type) at the very end of the play about the woman named Sensation that includes the “all new people” line.  And as usual, if you decide to use this piece we’d love to hear from you!

This has been

SOMEONE MONO-BLOGGING

and again,

I’M SHANNON

ENJOY!