Contemporary American Monologues for Women

Todd London

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781559361330
• eBook ISBN: 9781559367639
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

Audition monologues for female characters selected from recent works by American playwrights including Tony Kushner, Jon Robin Baitz, Constance Congdon, Paula Vogel, Donald Margulies, Emily Mann, Eric Bogosian, Nicky Silver, and others. Unique to the TCG monologue series is a bibliography of other works by the playwrights included.

1

“LISTEN TO YOUR

NIGHTMARES”

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

BY TONY KUSHNER

Zillah Katz is out of time with the play around her: it unfolds in Weimar Germany in the early thirties; she is alone in America, talking to the audience, circa 1990. In her “completely convinced, humorless, paranoic” mind, however, the Hitler years and those of Reagan and Bush are connected, as they’re both times of ascendant evil. In the author’s words, Zillah’s a “contemporary American Jewish woman. 30s. BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies.” When she’s not exhorting the audience, she’s obsessively firing off letters to the powers of evil.

ZILLAH: German lessons. Listen:

“Das Massengrab.” Mass grave.

“Die Zeit war sehr schlimm.” Times were bad.

“Millionen von Menschen waren tot.” Millions of people were dead. People try to be so fussy and particular when they look at politics, but what I think an understanding of the second half of the twentieth century calls for is not caution and circumspection but moral exuberance. Overstatement is your friend: use it. Take Evil: The problem is that we have this event—Germany, Hitler, the Holocaust—which we have made into THE standard of absolute Evil—well and good, as standards of Evil go, it’s not bad—but then everyone gets frantic as soon as you try to use the standard, nothing compares, nothing resembles—and the standard becomes unusable and nothing qualifies as Evil with a capital E. I mean how much of a Nazi do you have to be to qualify for membership? Is a twenty-five-percent Nazi a Nazi or not? Ask yourselves this: it’s 1942; the Goerings are having an intimate soiree; if he got an invitation, would Pat Buchanan feel out of place? Out of place? Are you kidding? Pig heaven, dust off the old tuxedo, kisses to Eva and Adolf. I mean just because a certain exactor-turned-President who shall go nameles sat idly by and watched tens of thousands die of a plague and he couldn’t even bother to say he felt bad about it, much less try to help, does this mean he merits comparison to a certain fascist-dictator anti-Semitic mass-murdering psychopath who shall also remain nameless? OF COURSE NOT! I mean I ask you—how come the only people who ever say “Evil” anymore are southern cracker televangelists with radioactive blue eye-shadow? None of these bastards look like Hitler, they never will, not exactly, but I say as long as they look like they’re playing in Mr. Hitler’s Neighborhood we got no reason to relax.

I never relax. I can work up a sweat reading the Sunday Times. I read, I gasp, I hit the streets at three a.m. with my can of spray paint:

REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!

Moral exuberance. Hallucination, revelation, gut-flutters in the night—the internal intestinal night bats, their panicky leathery wings—that’s my common sense. I pay attention to that. Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams. So eat something indigestible before you go to bed, and listen to your nightmares.

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

BY TONY KUSHNER

ZILLAH:

Dear Mr. President,

I know you will never read this letter. I’m fully aware of the fact that letters to you don’t even make it to the White House, that they’re brought to an office building in Maryland where civil-servant types are paid to answer the sane ones. Crazy, hostile letters—like mine—the ones written in crayon on butcher paper, the ones made of letters cut out of magazines—these get sent to the FBI, analyzed, Xeroxed and burned. But I send them anyway, once a day, and do you know why? Because the loathing I pour into these pages is so ripe, so full-to-bursting, that it is my firm belief that anyone touching them will absorb into their hands some of the toxic energy contained therein. This toxin will be passed upwards—it is the nature of bureaucracies to pass things vertically—till eventually, through a network of handshakes, the Under-Secretary of Outrageous Falsehoods will shake hands with the Secretary for Pernicious Behavior under the Cloak of Night, who will, on a weekly basis in Cabinet meetings, shake hands with you before you nod off to sleep. In this way, through osmosis, little droplets of contagion are being rubbed into your leathery flesh every day—in this great country of ours there must be thousands of people who are sending you poisoned post. We wait for the day when all the grams and drams and dollops of detestation will destroy you. We attack from below. Our day will come. You can try to stop me. You can raise the price of stamps again. I’ll continue to write. I’m saving up for a word processor. For me and my cause, money is no object.

Love,
Zillah.

MARISOL

BY JOSÉ RIVERA

In present-day New York City, the world has turned violent, terrifying, unrecognizable. Apples are extinct, the color blue has disappeared from the sky, cows’ milk has gone salty, and no one has seen the moon in nine months. An angel appears in this nightmare landscape, “a young black woman in ripped jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt. Crude silver wings hang limply from the back of Angel’s diamond-studded leather jacket.” She has, until now, been guardian angel to Marisol Perez of the Bronx and, as she details below, saved Marisol’s life many times. She’s giving up her charge, though, in order to lead the angels’ revolution against God. He’s the one, she claims, who’s brought the world to ruin. She’s talking to the sleeping Marisol.

ANGEL: I kick-started your heart, Marisol. I wired your nervous system. I pushed your fetal blood in the right direction and turned the foam in your infant lungs to oxygen. When you were six and your parents were fighting, I helped you pretend you were underwater: that you were a cold-blooded fish, in the bottom of the black ocean, far away and safe. When racists ran you out of school at ten, screaming

I turned the monsters into little columns of salt! At last count, one plane crash, one collapsed elevator, one massacre at the hands of a right-wing fanatic with an Uzi, and sixty-six-thousand-six-hundred-and-three separate sexual assaults never happened because of me.

Now the bad news.

I can’t expect you to understand the political ins and outs of what’s going on. But you have eyes. You asked me questions about children and water and war and the moon: the same questions I’ve been asking myself for a thousand years.

The universal body is sick, Marisol. Constellations are wasting away, the nauseous stars are full of blisters and sores, the infected earth is running a temperature, and everywhere the universal mind is wracked with amnesia, boredom, and neurotic obsessions.

Because God is old and dying and taking the rest of us with Him. And for too long, much too long, I’ve been looking the other way. Trying to stop the massive hemorrhage with my little hands, with my prayers. But it didn’t work and I knew if I didn’t do something soon, it would be too late.

I called a meeting. And I urged the Heavenly Hierarchies—the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels and Angels—to vote to stop the universal ruin . . . by slaughtering our senile God. And they did. Listen well, Marisol: angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood. And I’m going to lead them.

FAT MEN IN SKIRTS

BY NICKY SILVER

Phyllis Hogan, “an attractive and sophisticated woman in her 40s,” has just, following the crash of her plane, been stranded on a deserted island with her strange son, Bishop. Everyone else has died. When Bishop complains that he’s starving, she sends him after the only food on the island. “Here’s a knife,” she says. “Go back to the plane and cut the arm off that nun. Bring it back here and I’ll cook it and we’ll eat it.” He returns holding the nun’s arm—still clutching a rosary—triumphantly aloft. She steps toward the audience and speaks.

PHYLLIS: Lately, I have been having a recurring dream. When I was a little girl, we lived in a part of Philadelphia called Society Hill. In an apartment. Down the hall from us lived a Mr. Antonelli. Mr. Antonelli worked at the Museum of Natural History. And he was big. He was a big man. Must’ve weighed three hundred pounds. He was the fattest human being I’d ever seen, close up. But he was well-groomed. And on certain nights of the week, Saturdays, I think, Saturdays mostly and Thursdays, Mr. Antonelli would dress as a woman and go wherever three-hundred-pound men who dress as women go, to seek whatever they can mistake for love. He’d put on a skirt and a blouse, sometimes a mumu-Bloody-Mary-type thing. And a lot of makeup. He wore a wig, a reddish kind of Ethel Merman affair. And always lovely matching jewelry sets: green rhinestone earrings, green rhinestone bracelets, brooches. He got all dolled up and went off to seek others like himself (although I can’t imagine there were many others like Mr. Antonelli; three-hundred-pound transvestites are pretty much on their own in the world, I should think). When I was six, I was going to a friend’s birthday party on Saturday, and I was wearing the sweetest little powder-blue jumper, and Mr. Antonelli got into the elevator with my mother and me. He looked down at me—this great mountain of gelatinous white flesh, and said, “My goodness, what a sweet little blue dress you have on.” And I said, “You could borrow it sometime, if you want, Mr. Antonelli.” I was six, and the concept of Junior and Misses sizing had not yet been made clear to me. Well, my mother squeezed my hand so tightly I thought my fingers would snap off. Once on the street, she explained to me that I must never, ever speak to Mr. Antonelli again. If he spoke to me, I was to nod politely. But I was never—under any circumstances—to speak to him again. And I was certainly not to get into the elevator with him. My mother explained to me that Mr. Antonelli was a freak. That he should be locked up. Forgotten about. That Mr. Antonelli, although not to blame him for his condition, was nevertheless, the lowest form of the species, a creature to fear, and his parents, poor souls, must have a terrible burden to bear. Now. In my dream, I’m a little girl again. And I’m wearing my little powder-blue jumper. The one I wore that day. Only, I’m not on my way to any birthday party. I’m on a field trip with my class from school. We’re at the zoo. Riding the monorail and laughing. The sun is shining, balloons fill the sky and we have cotton candy for lunch. We go to the reptile house and the polar-bear cage and the tigers are sunning themselves. Then we go to the monkey house. But there aren’t any monkeys. There are, climbing the jungle gym, picking salt from their hair, dozens and dozens of fat men in skirts. Huge fat men, with matching jewelry sets, swinging from limb to limb, laughing in no language. And everyone laughs and points. And then they turn around. All the monkeys. All the men turn around at once. They turn around and look at me, right at me. And they all have the same face. And it’s Bishop’s face. They all have my son’s face.

TENEMENT LOVER:
No Palm Trees/In New York City

BY JESSICA HAGEDORN

The narrator’s monologue is one of several self-contained stories i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• An Actor Chooses: An Interview with Nancy Piccione
• 1. “Listen to your nightmares.”
• 2. “My life with him.”
• 3. “Everything in its place.”
• 4. “Why don’t you talk to a psychiatrist?”
• 5. “My first masterpiece.”
• 6. “Things you kids don’t know.”
• 7. “Are you alone?”
• 8. “The art of dining”
• 9. “One home to the next.”
• 10. “I thought my heart would burst.”
• 11. He got sick
• 12. “Do business with the Devil”
• 13. “What do you teach?”
• 14. “Bring back memories!”
• 15. “You wait your whole life for something good to happen and then it does!”
• 16. “Dreaming ahead.”
• 17. “World without end.”
• Further Reading
• About the Author