Tonight I'm teaching a workshop on playwriting to an acting class of teenagers, so I thought it'd be fun to share a monologue I wrote when I was a teen. Apparently I always wrote dark, somewhat disturbing things. People have asked me where it comes from, that I must have had a very traumatizing childhood. I didn't. I swear. Maybe it's left over trauma from a past life.
A Monologue for a Young Actor:
It's like that feeling I'd get when I was young and it was way past my bedtime but I was awake anyway and I was reading by the light of a flashlight under the blankets (which really only added to the feeling that I was doing something wrong--illegal in the parental domain) and I'd hear someone come up the stairs to listen outside my door and make sure I was okay. It's right then, when I can't tell whether I'm breathing in or out.
Or when I'm walking late at night and I turn a corner from darkness into bright lights and for a moment I think I've come face to face with a UFO, but it's really just the headlights of a car and I know I should move because if I don't I'll get hit. The dream... that's what it feels like.
I'm standing on the edge of a cliff, the kind they have in Ireland, overlooking the ocean. The water is sort of chaotic but it's a very calming moment. Then, out of nowhere, these clown heads, just heads, like the one from Stephen King's It, come floating up from below the cliff. Immediately I start throwing mom's steak knives at the floating heads.
When I wake up the next morning I am not at all surprised when I go to get a spoon for my cereal that there are more knives missing from the drawer. Mom however, is always quite displeased with this discovery.
That's got to be it. There's no other explanation. Why else would I be hoarding knives under my mattress? There aren't any bogey men. The only person who comes at night is there to listen at my door to make sure I'm okay. And I could never hurt my dad.
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