Episode 90: The Monologue Everything Program
In this podcast Lindsay talks about her love of monologues and the process of writing The Monologue Everything Program.
Show Notes
The Monologue Everything Program
Episode Transcript
Welcome to TFP, The Theatrefolk Podcast. Whoop whoop! I’m Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello, I hope you're well. Thanks for listening.
This is Episode 90. You can catch the links for this episode in the show notes at theatrefolk.com/episode90.
So, it’s been a while since I’ve done a “me” only podcast. (Hello, me. How are you? I’m doing awesome! Thanks for asking!) And the reason I’m doing it is because this is a very special week for me. It’s the launch of the Monologue Everything Program that I wrote. It is a two-ebook set that has taken me, I guess, a year and a half – over a year and a half – to go from idea to fruition. It’s been a long process.
So, it’s a step-by-step teacher’s guide to writing monologues and I couldn’t be happier to have: a) completed it, and b) get it out there in the world. I’m very glad it’s done and this will probably be the, you know, the last time I talk about it, but I do want to talk about it in this format where I can talk a little more in-depth. And the first thing I want to do is share a story.
So, I think that not a lot of ours customers, even our long-term customers, know that Theatrefolk started out as a production company before we were a publication company, before we were a publisher. And it was Craig and I, still – way back then and still to this day – and we loved theatre and we wanted to make a go of it and we formed a company. So, we wrote plays and we acted in them and we directed them and we did all the sets and the costumes for them. You know, we’re a two-hand band which I guess we still are, a little bit. And, frankly, we didn’t make very much money doing all this. We didn’t have very much.
And so, you know, you sort of get in a little bit of a spin cycle because we didn’t have money to, you know, hire extra actors or hire set designers, and we didn’t have money to go on big tours, and we didn’t know what to do. And we knew that were other companies out there who were doing this, other small companies, and we thought, “Well, why can’t we do this?” and it was around that time when I met the guy who really changed my life and really is, whether he knows it or not – I don’t think he does – but he’s really responsible to put me on the path to becoming the playwright I am and also the reason that Theatrefolk exists and that’s a director by the name of Dave Cheoros and he was casting for a Fringe Festival tour.
I know at this time I had an idea of what Fringe Festivals were. I’d never been to one but I had heard of them. You know, these week-long festivals where they’re mostly made up of one-act plays. But I didn’t know that you could, you know, put a tour together and that got my spidey senses really tingling and I went out and I auditioned and I got cast which was awesome and I spent four months touring. I toured from Montreal to Vancouver – which is like going from, I guess, Maine to California let’s say – and I took in a lot. I saw a lot of shows, a lot of different kinds of shows. I even volunteered at some festivals so I could see more shows. And I was seeing a lot of one-person monologues and that sort of clicked for me.
And, also, the fact that you could really tour on the cheap. You could tour, you know, as long as you had a car, you could do this, and I wanted to do it so, the next year, I wrote a show for myself, a one-person monologue show, it was called The Happy Positive Rejects Club. Really, it was about relationships and I played seven different characters and I learned two big things: I learned that I love writing monologues, that was the germ of it for me and I still do; but I really hated performing them. That’s a huge problem when you’re the only person on stage,