Tomorrow night, 7:30PM at the Carmel Community Playhouse, first-year MFA student, actress and theatre buff Elisabeth Giffin will take to the stage as part of Jane Martin‘s American Theatre Critics Association Award-winning play Talking With…. The play opens Thursday, October 17 but will run Thursday through Sunday (2:30PM matinee) this week and next.
Composed of eleven monologues delivered by a sundry cast of women including a baton twirler, a fundamentalist snake handler, and an ex-rodeo rider, Talking With… promises to “amuse, move and frighten.” Giffin opens the show with “15 Minutes” as Moira, an actress about to take the stage.
Because playwrights are in such short supply in our program, instead of my usual teaser I thought I’d ask Miss Giffin to share some insight into the genre and the monologue form. It turns out she’s basically a friendly encyclopedia. Read further if secret pseudonyms and a brief history of the monologue makes you salivate.
Tell me about Talking With….
Talking With… is a play comprised entirely of eleven ten-minute monologues. Each monologue depicts a different woman at an important time in her life, or at a time of revelation—for instance, in one monologue a woman deals with her mother’s death, in another a young woman prepares to give birth to a baby she knows will be deformed, and in yet another a woman is still obsessed with the Land of Oz. They range from funny to touching, and no two monologues are alike. That being said, there are two monologues delivered by “actresses,” one of which is mine.
You’re leading off the night with “15 Minutes,” yes? How does this monologue-only form differ from a more traditional play?
In my monologue, I am portraying a young actress 15 minutes before show-time, and I open the show. It has been a fun monologue to work on, but something very different for me in terms of characters I have portrayed in the past. As an actress, you draw from the script in creating your character— something that is difficult when the whole script for you is just a few pages of your character alone. So as an actress working on this piece, I am unable to take any clues that other characters from the play would provide. I have to draw all my conclusions from what my character says about herself, and have to make decisions based on clues from the playwright as to how honest the character is with herself, and where perhaps she is irrational, or unrealistic, or holding back.
The interesting thing about Talking With… is that it is essentially a collection of one-woman shows, and even though it is credited to Jane Martin, most believe that this is a pen-name for Jon Jory. Jory used to be the artistic director at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and was just absolutely instrumental in making it what it is today for actors and especially playwrights (with things like the Humana Festival and the National Ten Minute Play Contest). There are some other speculative authors – all male and all involved with ATL, which first produced the show in New York in ’82 – but it is pretty well assumed that Jory is the man behind Martin, whether or not he will ever admit it. In any case, there are definite clues within the script that this play for women was in fact written by a man; for instance, one character is described as being “in her early forties, but attractive,” something no woman would ever doubt or feel the need to qualify.
You’re a playwright, poet, and fictioner by trade, yes? Do you feel any particular connection to the monologue as a form, and have you composed many monologues yourself? Do you find poems and monologues to be intrinsically similar as pieces of literature?
As a writer, it is fun to be in a show with so many different characters and so many rich stories. I am mostly a playwright myself before anything else, and I am a huge proponent of the monologue in my own writing despite the fact that they are often more challenging for actors. I did some interesting research on postmodernism and the monologue, and how the monologue itself is shaping new theatre. (This was part of my thesis that I worked on at Miami when I was working towards a Master’s in Theatre—which I haven’t completed because I switched tracks to the MFA here). I could probably bore you a lot about playwriting theory and postmodernism, but I won’t.
You asked about poems and monologues, and I think that they are intrinsically connected, particularly throughout theatre history. For instance, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the early modern European theatre (so 16th-18th centuries) relied heavily on soliloquy and monologue to convey action— and famously write in verse. These plays were poetry! Same for classical Greek and Roman drama, and even with early Ottoman drama— which primarily was karagoz, or shadow puppetry with the addition of song. In theatre, you treat a song the way you treat a monologue as far as preparing for it and marking emotional beats, etc. And we all know that since its origins, the American musical has had lyricists that have relied heavily on rhyme and traditional meter to create catchy, upbeat songs and memorable, heart-wrenching ballads.
The monologue today, however, functions much differently in that it is used less as a means to convey action and move the plot along, and more to convey and deepen characters and plot points that have already been established. Monologues today are an opening up— a tête à tête between the character and the audience. They are used less often now for the playwright to philosophize on the nature of abstract things or worldviews (think Hamlet debating action versus inaction), and more to enrich the world of the play itself— by strengthening the bond between the character and audience.
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Intrigued? Get your monologue on: Talking With…, 7:30PM Thurs – Sat & 2:30PM Sun, this week and next, Carmel Community Playhouse. To be there or not to be there– that’s not even a question.