Maj Monologues Competition Finalists

Hi Gordon. Firstly, you might like to know that the judges selected 'Shelly Kelly's Day O' Destiny' as the winning monologue. The encouragement award went to "A Brush With A Hood". And the people's choice, voted by all attending audiences, was also 'Shelly Kelly's Day O' Destiny". Based on my experience as a judge this year, I can offer a few pointers. These tips are based purely on my own opinion, and don't necessarily represent the opinions of the other judges or the organisers of the event. I also need to be general, and not refer to any specific entries. I was given about 120 scripts, with no indication of who the author was, only a number to identify them. I had to choose 15. As I read each one, I straightaway gave them an initial mark out of 10 (knowing that until I'd read a dozen or so and learned what my benchmark average was, I'd have to go back and re-mark). The scripts quite readily separated themselves into great, good, average, and poor. After the initial sorting I gave every script the benefit of a re-read, occasionally re-adjusting the mark, before then only focussing on the top entries. As you can imagine, in a writing competition, scripts that struggled with sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and layout weren't regarded so highly. They weren't completely disregarded for this alone (they usually failed for other reasons) but a good basic pointer might be to get someone reliable to proof-read your work! It was also surprising how many entries were more or less very similar. An original approach to a character or the subject matter therefore really made me take notice. (However there were a select few entries that were SO original that they seemed to forget about being coherent! It's no good being different just for the sake of it, or for shock value, if you neglect to make the monologue work. The script might stand out...for the wrong reasons!) Another big pitfall was a number of scripts that seemed to forget this was a theatrical monologue, i.e. intended to be performed. This is getting into more advanced criticism; there were several scripts that were well constructed stories, and may have been funny to read...but there was no drama. The character's journey went nowhere. I could not imagine them coming to life onstage. (I was very careful to not just read each piece like I would a novel or short story, but to imagine an actor delivering it onstage in front of an audience.) This is where the topic "A funny thing happened on the way to..." may have led many entries astray. It immediately conjures an image of the stand-up comedian, delivering pithy one-liners. (In fact quite a few scripts had characters that were actually stand-up comedians.) But a stand-up routine isn't necessarily dramatic. A long sequence of jokes, or the kind of story that goes "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened..." doesn't necessarily lend itself to a character that goes on any kind of journey. (And by 'journey' I don't simply mean travel, but an emotional or personal change). The best monologues all involved the storyteller going through some kind of change; experiencing and resolving some sort of conflict, internal or external; sharing some emotion with the audience. Not just observing funny things, without any real attachment. There may have been some confusion with topic suggestion "A funny thing happened on the way to...". Many scripts began with exactly that line. Now this may have been okay once or twice, but it became very tedious when I had to read about 50 scripts that started the very same way. Scripts that had shown originality by incorporating the line more subtly gained more of my respect. And in actual fact, they didn't even need to quote the line exactly, they simply needed to base your piece on that concept as a suggestion. Try to incorporate next year's suggestion with originality, it'll go a long way. There were a number of scripts, perhaps also following a school of comedy, that were downright ugly and angry in their use of language - even while being funny. Perhaps they were poorly modelling the John Cleese/Graham Chapman skits of the early 70's that consisted of layer after layer of clever verbal abuse, or many other stand ups whose routines consist of a torrent of angry wisecracks...for me, these scripts merely became unpleasant to listen to. Although I found some of them amusing in a clever sort of way, I didn't enjoy them and couldn't picture an audience in the theatre really enjoying them. Simply stringing together witty torrents of abuse wasn't particularly impressive. It would have been good for these writers to have considered the audience they were writing for. If you expect to win a competition, you need to please/impress the people running the competition. I don't want to say that the way the script was formatted and set out had too much influence on how I judged the content, but in actual fact there was a high correlation: the best scripts also happened to be ones that were written in a professional looking style, with no typos or grammar errors. Ones that didn't look like so much care was given were usually also reflected in the quality of the script itself. Stage directions: yes, by all means, so long as they are really relevant. To say something like 'he sits in a chair' might SEEM essential in the mind of the writer, but to be honest, in the hands of a good actor and director they could choose to ignore this, or substitute any other action, and still justifiably serve the meaning of the piece. Because of the nature of presenting ALL of the monologues as a unified performance event, the director may choose to stage them in an efficient manner so they flow from one to the next, which means keeping furniture and staging, any large props etc, to a minimum. Scene setting, therefore, is more useful to give an impression of the type of image you wish to present...how that image is actually realised onstage is up to the director. Don't expect them to take it literally. (For instance, a script might start with "Scene: A hospital". If you were filming it or staging it naturalistically, you might have medical equipment onstage. In the context of a monologue though, it will probably become readily apparent by what the character says. And in some cases, it's advantageous for dramatic effect to wait until the dialogue reveals where you are, rather than make it overt before anyone even speaks). But then, for instance, one of the monologues started with an artist's easel onstage, and this simply and effectively conveyed everything we needed to know about the character and context. There was a script that included lots of blackouts. This became a little problematic when put before an audience; there were several 'false endings' where the audience started applauding because they thought it had finished. In my opinion, it slowed the piece down and I think it could have been written in a way where time passed without the need to have any blackouts. (Not a lot was revealed by the blackouts apart from a slight change of position and a sense of time passing. But it felt clunky). I really liked the character and the original story, I just felt it could have been delivered in a more efficient manner. This is not to say that theatrical devices like this shouldn't be used, or that elaborate stage directions or props shouldn't be specified; just be aware that it raises the stakes a hell of a lot for the complication and quality of your monologue, so as a writer you ought to be very confident you can use them wisely. A lot of monologues were TOO LONG. This is even true of many that made it through to the finals...during the rehearsal process, if it was found to take longer than the maximum 15 minutes, the scripts were sent back to the writers with suggestions for bits that could be trimmed. It'd be a good idea to have your monologue read out aloud for timing - and not just read, but read dramatically, i.e. as an actor would read it with pauses for timing and business, to get a sense of the true length of the performance. The number of words, or pages, is not always a true indicator of the stage time of the monologue. Once I'd scored every script, I collected all the ones that had ranked 'high' or 'excellent' and read those yet again, to choose my top 15. Then the judges met and collaboratively decided on the 8 that would make it to finals. Some were unanimously at the top of our lists, others had to be argued for according to each judges preferences. Remember that it's a highly subjective process by nature. A different selection of judges may have come up with a different top 8. But overall, we were pretty consistent in our rankings. I thought the casting of the 8 monologues was excellent. The director chose performers who all enhanced their individual monologues and fully gave justice to the writer's vision. Each judge saw the event twice. Gordon said above, 'the competition is on the writing not the presentation' - but in actual fact, the performance was very important. After all, a monologue is not just a script, in my opinion. It doesn't exist until it is being spoken aloud by an actor. What the director and performer brought out often enhanced what had originally been there, particularly in characterisation and comic timing. But it's true we weren't judging the performances. On the first viewing I realised I may have been swayed by my gut reaction to the actors' performances. So I ranked the scripts in several different ways: according to the ones I thought were most engaging; according to how originally or cleverly structured it was; according to the performance I liked most; according to how the audience had reacted, etc. Some scripts changed rank significantly according to my different criteria, indicating that in some cases the actor's performance made me like the script a lot better, for instance. But my top scripts didn't change rank regardless of the criteria, indicating that neither the actors performance, or the crowd reaction, etc, had anything to do with effecting the quality of the writing. They scored highly in whatever category I emphasized because they were obviously good scripts. On my second viewing, on finals night, I was more analytical, looking harder at the structure of the piece in performance, and less at the actors' performance. I was more clinical in observing the audience response. I could also notice how some scripts simply didn't engage me a second time as much as they had on the first viewing. And equally, there were several scripts that thoroughly drew me in, even though I had already seen them in performance. These reactions and observations were what led me to choose my clear favourites, and on collaborating at the end of the night with the other judges, we were almost in total concord with our final scores. In the end the winner was a script that wasn't TRYING to be funny, it simply was. It was a beautifully realised character that took us on a journey that we really cared about. We laughed, cried, recognised and believed in the character. It was no coincidence that the audience favorite was also the judge's favorite. It hit all the right buttons. I hope this has been a useful insight into the judging process (or at least my personal process). Good luck to all the writers who make future submissions. Cheers, Craig ~<8>-/====\---------