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Male Monologue from Perfection
a work in progress
By Brad Boesen
[Copyright by author. All rights reserved.]
**Author's note: A couple of visitors have expressed confusion over the bits of extraneous dialogue from secondary characters that I've included in my monologues. "Aren't monologues supposed to be just one person talking?" Yes. They are. The extra dialogue is included, mainly, to provide context so that the performer knows what happened just before, and what is going on during his or her speech. It is also included for completion's sake (this is how the monologue appears in the actual play). When this dialogue appears in the middle of the monologue it can usually be fairly easily ignored in performance (sometimes requiring some minor re-wording) or (my preference) the dialogue can be responded to as if the other actor were actually on stage with you. The monologue will be more dynamic and interesting that way, and the audience will still understand perfectly well what's going on. Hope that clears things up. Feel free to e-me with any other questions or comments.
BEN
Listen, Amy. Listen! I'm sorry. Look, I only came here
because I... Well... It's stupid, but... I ran into my ex
the other day.
[AMY
Oh!]
BEN
My latest ex, and... And she was with a guy...
[AMY
Oh, I see.]
BEN
No, wait. Wait, you don't. You don't see. It's not... I
mean I don't even really like this woman, you know? I mean,
not as... You know. It was a relief when we broke up,
because she was just so boring. OK, we were boring together.
Whatever. But... I don't know.
So I see her with this guy, and they're happy and giggling
and I just can't help thinking, this is not fair. I mean,
she subjected me to this relationship that was... Boring
isn't even the word for it. She used to like to spend entire
evenings showing me her scrapbooks. And they were literally
"scrap" books! Shelf after shelf of these books that she'd
filled with scraps of paper that she'd found, wherever, but
had pasted into the books in some kind of order that, she
said, revealed some kind of "grand scheme of the universe" or
something.
[AMY
Cool!]
BEN
No! Really. It wasn't. I mean, she'd have, like, a part of
a label from a jar of peanuts, and next to that would be a...
I don't know... A receipt for hair spray, and this was meant
to indicate that, since she found them in the same trash can,
but the peanut label was on top, that the... The... That
the whole corporate manufacturing industry was hopelessly
corrupt and should be replaced immediately by a purely
agricultural system if we're to have any hope at all of
surviving as a species. Which... I don't know. Maybe
that's true, but...
[AMY
But still!]
BEN
Yeah! And then she'd turn the page and there'd be this...
Some landscape from a magazine or something with a little rip
in the sky and she'd get all excited and she'd say, "See?
See? From the hair spray! The hole in the ozone! I found
this in the very next alley!"
I thought it was cute, you know? Til we got to, like, volume
10 and I realized, that's what's in all the books on her
shelves.