Female Monologue

Crimes of the Heart
Beth Henley

Babe:

We were just standing around on the back porch playing with Dog. Suddenly Zackery comes from around the side of the house, and he startled me ‘cause he’s supposed to be away at the office, and there he is coming from ‘round the side of the house. Anyway he says to Willie Jay “Hey, boy, what are you doing back here?”  And I said, “He’s not doing anything. You just run right on Home.” Well, before he can move, Zackery comes up and knocks him once right across the face and then shoves him down the porch steps, causing him to skin up his elbow real bad on that hard concrete. Then he says, “Don’t you ever come around here again, or I’ll have them cut out your gizzard!” Well, Willie Jay starts crying, these tears come streaming down his face then he gets up real quick and runs away with Dog following off after him. After that, I don’t remember much too clearly; let’s see… I went on into the living room, and I went right up to the davenport and opened the drawer where we keep the burglar gun, I took it out, Then I brought it up to my ear,  That’s right. I put it right inside my ear, Why, I was gonna shoot off my own head!  That’s what I was gonna do.  Then I heard the back door slamming and suddenly, for some reason, I thought about mama…how she’d hung herself, and here I was about ready to shoot myself, then I realized—that’s right I realized how I didn’t want to kill myself! And she—she probably didn’t want to kill herself, she wanted to kill him and I wanted to kill him, too. I wanted to kill Zackery, not myself ‘cause I wanted to live! So I waited for him to come on into the living room. Then I held out the gun, and I pulled the trigger, aiming for his heart, but getting him in the stomach… It’s funny that I really did that.

Female Monologue

Women of Manhattan

John Patrick Shanley

Judy:

I will! I will dream on. Because that is exactly what I am talking about. My dreams. Which you do not know. And which you don’t think are important enough to know. Do you think this body is something? What a joke! Any great poet the last three thousand years will tell you what a joke that is! This stuff, this flesh, this heavy breathing … We have this aptitude in our hearts and brains and souls to arrive at something so rich and inflamed and unspeakable and sacred and New! Not this tired shit you want to foist on me. That’s not what I want. I won’t give up my standards! I know what I know. If I tried to live on the kind of things you’re offering me, I’d starve to death. You’ve got to dig for treasure, Duke! Not settle for the stuff just lying out on the ground. You could sleep with me if you weren’t so god damn lazy and narcissistic and were willing to exert yourself a little and show some interest in the actual core of another human being! But you will not sleep with me because I will not perform a stupid mechanical pantomime, like I was trying and failing to remember something fine, something from a better world, something alien and beautiful and lost! What, you look vacant, don’t you get it? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. I’ll give it to you in basic modern American: I’m not interested in the hardware without the software. Look, let’s just let this fall apart, okay? Don’t hang around for the sake of neatness. I’ll get the check. It was worth that much to me to have my say.

Female Monologue

Seascape with Sharks and Dancer

Don Nigro

Tracy:

You can’t connect things up in your mind, Ben. When I tell you I’m going to meet you someplace and you go and wait there for two hours and then come home and find me sitting here eating a popsicle, what do you do? Do you yell at me? Do you beat me up? Do you throw me out? No. You come over and lick my popsicle. Like you expected me not to come but you waited anyway and then you come home and act like you’re not even mad. You act like you accept me. But you DON’T accept me. You don’t even SEE me. You see some nice little drippy-eyed girl who just can’t help herself because of her unfortunate childhood toilet training experiences, when in reality I am a normal healthy person who screams a lot and knows exactly what she’s doing. You can’t be anybody’s father. You’re unfit. You can’t just ACCEPT your children. You’ve got to teach them how to handle themselves and how rotten the world is. We can’t have a baby. We can’t “make the best of it.” That’s another thing wrong with you. You’re always trying to make the best of things. Do you realize what a pain in the ass that is? There are many things you can’t make the best out of, and I’m one of them. I am not domesticable, I never WAS domesticable, and I’m never going to BE domesticable, so just forget it. Boy, I should have got out of here so fast when I could have. Babies are the worst trap there is. They make you old. We’ll be OLD.

Female Monologue

Eastern Standard 

by Richard Greenberg

Phoebe:

Peter, he wants to be good. Have we ever known anyone who’s even thought that way? It’s driving him crazy, lying around here, doing nothing. I see him late at night, making lists, thinking things through, scouting for ways to make himself useful. And he looks at me and I realize that what he wants is to be good enough for me- which is completely absurd- but it touches me and it makes me happy and I think “life can be something completely different from anything I’d planned.” Things can be calm, and simple, and complete. Except Loomis is there. I never see him but he’s there. He’s taken root in my life and I can’t get rid of him... and then Stephen comes along, this accident, this surprise. Offering the best life I could possibly hope to have and I never quite take it. And I never let him in on how much I feel about him because I know I can’t be counted on.