Monologues for Women
HOLD ME
by Jules Feiffer
Katy:
I talk too much. I’m quite bright, so it’s interesting, but nevertheless, I talk too much.
You see, already I’m saying much more than I should say. Men hate it for a woman
to blurt out, ‘I’m bright.’ They think she’s really saying, I’m brighter than you are.’ As a
matter of fact, that is what I am saying. I’m brighter than even the brightest men I
know. That’s why it’s a mistake to talk too much. Men fall behind and feel challenged
and grow hostile. So when I’m very attracted to a man I make a point to talk more
slowly than I would to one of my woman friends. And because I guide him along from
insight he ends up being terribly impressed with his own brilliance. And with mine for
being able to keep up with him. And he tells me I’m the first woman he’s ever met
who’s as interesting as one of his boyfriends. That’s love.
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Monologues for Women
Stuff Happens
David Hare
BRIT:
'America changed.' That's what we're told. 'On September 11th everything changed.'
'If you're not American, you can't understand.' The infantile psychobabble of popular
culture is grafted opportunistically onto America's politics. The language of childish
entitlement becomes the lethal rhetoric of global wealth and privilege. Asked how you
are as President, on the first day of a war which will kill around thirty thousand
people: 'I feel good.'
I was in Saks Fifth Avenue the morning they bombed Baghdad. 'Isn't it wonderful?'
says the saleswoman. 'At last we're hitting back.' 'Yes,' I reply.
'At the wrong people. Somebody steals your handbag, so you kill their second
cousin, on the grounds they live close. Explain to me,' I say, 'Saudi Arabia is
financing Al Qaeda. Iran, Lebanon and Syria are known to shelter terrorists. North
Korea is developing a nuclear weapons programme. All these you leave alone. No,
you go to war with the one place in the region admitted to have no connection with
terrorism.' 'You're not American,' says the saleswoman. 'You don't understand.'
Oh, a question, then. If 'You're not American. You don't understand' is the new
dispensation, then why not 'You're not Chechen'? Are the Chechens also now
licensed? Are Basques? Theatres, restaurants, public squares? Do Israeli milk-bars
filled with women and children become fair game on the grounds that 'You don't
understand. We're Palestinian, we're Chechen, we're Irish, we're Basque'? If the
principle of international conduct is now to be that you may go against anyone you
like on the grounds that you've been hurt by somebody else, does that apply to
everyone? Or just to America?
On September 11th, America changed. Yes. It got much stupider.
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Monologues for Women
Europe
Michael Gow
Act 4
BARBARA:
Always ‘us’, ‘all of you’, ‘we’, ‘them’. Never ‘I’, ‘me’, just ‘you alone’. Do you ever
think of one individual person? Can you look at one human being and see only one
human being, or do you have to see millions of others standing behind in a crowd
that stretches to the horizon? Germans who are punctual, Frenchmen who all wear
berets, Italians all waving their arms in the air, Americans chewing gum? What do all
Australians do? How do you see them? I’ll tell you what they all do: they beat their
heads against a wall crying ‘We don’t need you. We’re as good as you. We are
happy with ourselves.’ That’s all anyone said while I was there. They would tell me
over and over and over how independent you all were, how grown up you all have
become, how confident, how open, mature, positive, repeating it all constantly like a
chant. But it can’t be true. No one who is happy needs to repeat, ‘I am happy’ a
thousand times a day to convince himself. All of you are deeply unhappy, as
unhappy as everybody else. You are all paranoiacs. You see, I can play that game,
I can put you at the front of a crowd and pretend you represent them all. I can go on
and on too. I can say that your newness, your freshness, your freedom from tradition
attracted my world-weary, neurotic decaying European sensibility. I can say you
represent all the things that are missing from my life: romance, laughter, space, clear
dazzling light. But I would be talking in clichés. It would have no meaning …
[in a sad, angry outburst] I missed you so badly! I missed your jokes. I missed
your body. I was happy for a week, but human happiness terrifies me. I wanted to
stay with you but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to come home, but I had to. I wish I’d never
met you. Being with you again makes me realise how unhappy I really am. I don’t
want to see you again. And I don’t want you to go, ever.
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Monologues for Women
Saint Joan
George Bernard Shaw
Scene 6
JOAN:
Give me that writing.
[She rushes to the table; snatches up the paper; and tears it into fragments.]
Light your fire: do you think I dread it as much as the life of a rat in a hole? My
voices were right! …
Yes: they told me you were fools and that I was not to listen to your fine words
nor trust to your charity. You promised me my life; but you lied. You think that life is
nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on
bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be
clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the
light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can
never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp
darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when
your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the
furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse; I
could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights
and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I
could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs
crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my
angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and
my your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know
that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.
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Monologues for Women
BlackRock
Nick Enright
CHERIE:
It was my fault. If we stuck together like we said, you and me and Leanne, you
wouldn’t be here. But I lost youse all. Now I’ve lost you. And no-one knows how. You
should hear the rumours. Someone seen a black Torana with Victorian number
plates. It was a stranger in a Megadeath T-shirt, it was a maddie from the hospital,
even your stepdad. All these ideas about who did it, who did it, like it was a TV show.
It is a TV show. Every night on the news. I want to yell out, this is not a body, this is
Tracy you’re talking about. Someone who was here last week, going to netball,
working at the Pizza Hut, getting the ferry, hanging out. You were alive. Now you’re
dead. But I know you can hear me. I can hear you.
She plays a bit of the song.
Your song. Times we danced to that, you and me and Shana, Shana singing dirty
words, remember? Mum hearing and throwing a mental…. I shouldn’t laugh, should
I? Not here. But all I can think of is the other words.
She turns off the tape.
You were wearing my earrings. You looked so great.
And some guy took you off and did those things to you.
Wish I knew who. You know, Trace. Nobody else does.
If I knew, but I’d go and kill him. I’d smash his head in. I’d cut his balls off.
I’d make him die slowly for what he did to you.
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Monologues for Women
Oleanna
David Mamet
CAROL:
Professor, I came here as a favour. At your personal request. Perhaps I should not
have done so. But I did. On my behalf, and on behalf of my group. And you speak of
the tenure committee, one of whose members is a woman, as you know. And though
you might call it Good Fun, or An Historical Phrase, or An Oversight, or All of the
Above, to refer to the committee as Good Men and True, it is a demeaning remark. It
is a sexist remark, and to overlook it is to countenance continuation of that method of
thought. You love the Power. I’m sorry. You feel yourself empowered … you say so
yourself. To strut. To posture. To “perform.” To “Call me in here…” Eh? You say that
higher education is a joke. And treat it as such, you treat it as such. And confess to a
taste to play the Patriarch in your class. To grant this. To deny that. To embrace your
students. And you think it’s charming to “question” in yourself this taste to mock and
destroy.
But you should question it. Professor. And you pick those things which you feel
advance you: publication, tenure, and the steps to get them you call “harmless
rituals.” And you perform those steps. Although you say it is hypocrisy. But to the
aspirations of your students. Of hardworking students, who come here, who slave to
come here – you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school – you mock us.
You call education “hazing” and from your so-protected, so-elitist seat you hold our
confusion as a joke, and hopes and efforts with it. Then you sit there and say “what
have I done?” And ask me to understand that you have aspirations too. But I tell you.
I tell you. That you are vile. And that you are exploitative. And if you possess one
ounce of that inner honesty you describe in your book, you can look in yourself and
see those things that I see. And you can find revulsion equal to my own. Good Day.
(she prepares to leave the room).
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Monologues for Women
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA
Act III Scene II
CRESSIDA
Hard to seem won; but I was won, my lord,
With the first glance that ever - pardon me.
If I confess much, you will play the tyrant.
I love you now; but till now not so much
But I might master it. In faith, I lie;
My thoughts were like unbridled children, grown
Too headstrong for their mother.
See, we fools! Why have I blabb'd?
Who shall be true to us,
When we are so unsecret to ourselves?
But, though I lov’d you well, I woo'd you not;
And yet, good faith, I wish'd myself a man,
Or that we women had men's privilege
Of speaking first. Sweet, bid me hold my tongue,
For in this rapture I shall surely speak
The thing I shall repent. See, see, your silence,
Cunning in dumbness, from my weakness draws
My soul of counsel. Stop my mouth.
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Monologues for Women
MACBETH
Act I Sc VII
LADY MACBETH
What beast was't then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And, to be more than what you were, you would
Be so much more the man. Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.
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