I’ve been cast in a new season of Baggage Productions’ “Madwomen Monologues”, performing late November. This will be my first time back on stage for a couple of years, so I’m equal parts excited and nervous. I’m going to be performing a monologue called ‘Rocket’, written by Kerry Drumm, (check her out here: https://kerrydrummwords.com) and directed by Lucy Norton, a talented artist who has worked with Baggage Productions for years.
The audition process was fantastic: prepare and perform a one-minute monologue, and then dive into some cold reads. I decided to find a new monologue (always good to find something new that you connect with), and happened upon ‘After Dinner’ by Andrew Bovell. I chose a darkly comic piece about a fragile woman realising she’s actually relieved that her husband has died, and she gets to start again with her life (oh, my poor partner, hope he didn’t read too much into my choosing that piece…)! But it was fun and funny, and it took a couple of weeks of daily rehearsing and warm ups to finally get to the heart of it. In the audition, I got to cold read a few snippets of other monologues (is it weird that I love doing a cold read? I feel like that first instinct when reading is often the best). And the snippet that I chose to go with, the one that I really understood, ended up coming from ‘Rocket’ – the piece I was cast in. Gotta trust those instincts!
Rocket is a fantastic monologue – dark, funny, layered – from a woman at the moment she’s handcuffed and arrested. I won’t tell you what she did; you’ll have to come and see it!
Madwomen Monologues: 11th to the 23rd November at the Butterfly Club, Melbourne. Check the Butterfly Club website for details and tickets.
Samantha Hill 