Scoring a Monologue, Part 2 - Stressing Words and a Little Bit About Beats

When it comes to scoring a monologue, it is important for you to know which words you are going to stress. A monologue may already have some clues in it. For example, the monologue that I perform from Pizza Man from Darlene Craviotto already has the word "Usually" in italics. I know that this means it is stressed. The way the punctuation is also makes it obvious when sentences aren't quite whole and when Julie (that's the character who says these lines) pauses in odd places. However, not everything is marked.

I'm doing fine, thank you. Today's an off day. Usually I do fine. I get numb. I wander through supermarkets and life like a zombie. Never getting upset. Never getting angry . . . I did go shopping today. but I had to leave. I stood in the jams and jellies for fifteen minutes. Fiften minutes, Alice. I coldn't decide . . . Mint Jelly or Orange Marmalde. I didn't know what I wanted . . . And for the first time in my life it pissed me off. (She takes a drink) . . . I wanted to smash every jar on the shelf. Run through every aisle and knock everything to the floor. I wanted to explode! . . . But, I didn't. I was a good girl. I went home and started drinking. (She sips at her drink). And I will continue to drink. Until the zombie returns. Until everything gets numb again.

Everybody scores their monologues in different ways. There is no one right way to do this. What matters is that it works for you. However, what my teacher did when I was working on this monologue was to have me underline the words that I would stress. This worked well for me.

It may not be the exact way it seems I perform the monologue, but I try to stick to what I decided. So, when marking words for emphasis, my monologue looked something like this:

I'm doing fine, thank you. Today's an off day. Usually I do fine. I get numb. I wander through supermarkets and life like a zombie. Never getting upset. Never getting angry . . . I did go shopping today. but I had to leave. I stood in the jams and jellies for fifteen minutes. Fiften minutes, Alice. I coldn't decide . . . Mint Jelly or Orange Marmalde. I didn't know what I wanted . . . And for the first time in my life it pissed me off. (She takes a drink) . . . I wanted to smash every jar on the shelf. Run through every aisle and knock everything to the floor. I wanted to explode! . . . But, I didn't. I was a good girl. I went home and started drinking. (She sips at her drink). And I will continue to drink. Until the zombie returns. Until everything gets numb again.

These are my choices for this monologue. You may have different choices for it.

As for beats, while sometimes the word beat is used for a short pause, that's not what it means. A beat is a unit of action. It can mean a unit of action between two characters or a unit of action for when a mood changes with one character. There are many beats for when Julie's mood changes in this piece.

I'll address more about the beats in this piece tomorrow.