Today, I performed my monologue. It was Jane's Never had a cellphone monologue from Dead Man's Cellphone by Sarah Ruhl. I'd chosen it because I deeply connected with the objective behind her monologue, which I identified as the verb "To bare [oneself]" or "to uncover". In the play, Jane has been constantly lying to everyone she meets. The monologue is her first attempt to be honest with both Dwight, a friend and later lover of hers, and herself. In the monologue, she talks about herself, and her desire to sometimes "disappear" from life. This was another thing that I related to deeply, not to mention her opinion that everyone around her was "disappearing the more they [were there]"; completely buried in technology.
I feel as though my monologue went well. There were certain lines in which I had to stop myself from actually crying; my eyes were teary through the whole performance. This had a lot to do with how I held myself during the monologue; I made sure to lock my knees and keep close to myself, creating a level of tension that induced loneliness and small-scale claustrophobia. When I did that, I was attempting to connect with Stanislavsky's method of using movement to bring about emotion, rather than vice versa.
After all of us finished our monologues, Mrs. Dempsey talked about empathy and charity, both in an actual context and with relevance to theatre. Charity is feeling sorry for someone; recognizing the emotion they are in and attempting to comfort them. Simultaneously, however, charity is not wanting to be in their place. Empathy, on the other hand, is fully relating to a character or person; fully baring yourself to what they are feeling, regardless of whether you want to be in their situation.
This might be a traumatic process - for example, one girl in our class did a monologue about a woman getting an abortion - but I agree that empathy is necessary in order to fully perform. Hopefully the revised performance of my monologue connects with this concept.
