Second Monologue

During this week, I have done work on my monologues based on the story ‘fences.’ Compare to last time when I worked on my own monologue, I could improve significantly by fixing the mistakes that I made during the last monologue.

I chose the character ‘Cory’ for my monologue, because I wanted to express his feelings of disappointment and anger toward his father dramatically; the biggest reason I chose him was that I was able to feel Cory’s anger and pressure from his Troy when Troy didn’t allow him to play football but force him to go workplace and earn money for the family. Additionally, I liked the symbolization that Cory used to express his father as a “shadow who follows him every time,” and “That shadow digging into your flesh, trying to crawl in, trying to live through you” The quotes really impressed me, and I could go through his pain, pressure, hate, and suffer that Cory feels toward his father Troy. As I understood Cory’s emotion and role during the book really well, I thought I would be more able to perform his act rather than other Characters like Rose and Gabriel.

During acting my monologue in front of my classmates, I tried hard to appeal my anger and disappoint feelings toward Troy. So I used big hand gestures to draw attention from the audience and talked with strong loud tones to emphasize the hate feeling and pressure that Cory felt from his father. Since my first monologue performance was not really successful due to my nervousness and forgetting some parts of my script, I tried really hard to improve my second monologue by memorizing Cory’s monologue perfectly, trying to be relaxed rather than being nervous, and trying to eye contact with my classmates sitting in front of me. Frankly, I think I improved amazingly compare to the first monologue that I had done in the small classroom before; the environment and atmosphere in the black box made me feel to be prepared to act professionally, and I could fully focus on appealing my emotion to the audience during acting because I already memorized all my script. However, I still had some difficulties to express various emotions because of the nervousness, so I thought that I would have to develop my ability to speak and communicate in front of lot amount of people.

Throughout watching others’ monologues, the impressive one was Lesley’s sad performance; while acting Rose’s monologue, Lesley was really well at expressing Rose’s grieve emotion toward Troy, and I could see she almost cried since she was so into the perform. After watched her monologue performance, I could stand in Rose’s perspective and be able to imagine her sad situation. On the other hand, I could see few people were struggling with their monologues because they forgot the script or felt so nervous while acting in front of us. Through watching my classmates’ monologues and comparing to mine, I learned that the monologue should be clear, fully memorized, relaxed, loud, and acted with using various emotions in order to draw attention from the audience.