Teen/20s Male Monologues

Monologues Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen OSWALD (20-30): Ah, the joy of life, mother; that's a thing you don't know much about in these parts. I have never felt it here.... And then, too, the joy of o f work. At bottom, it's the same t hing. But that too you know nothing about.... Here people are brought up to believe that work is a curse and a punishment for sin, and that life is something miserable, something we want to be done with, the sooner the bette r.... Have you noticed that everything I have painted has t urned upon the joy of life? always, always upon the joy of life? -- light and sunshine and glorious air, and faces radiant with happiness? That is why I am afraid of remaining at home with you. MRS. ALVING: Oswald, you spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father when he was a young lieutenant. He was brimming over with the joy of life!... He had not object in life, but only an official position. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant -- only loafers and boon companions--... So that happened which was sure to happen.... Oswald, my dear boy; has it shaken you very much? OSWALD: Of course it came upon me as a great surprise, but, after all, it can't matter much to me. MRS. ALVING: Can't matter! That your father was so infinitely miserable! OSWALD: Of course I can pity him as I would anybody else; but-MRS. ALVING: Nothing more? Your own father! OSWALD: Oh, there! "Father," "father"! I never knew anything of father. I don't remem ber anything about him except -- that he once made me sick.

 A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

TORVALD (30-45): (Standing at Nora’s doorway.) Try and calm yourself, and make your mind easy again, my frightened little singing-bird. Be at rest, and feel secure; I have broad wings to shelter you under. (Walks up and down by the door.) How warm and cozy o ur home is, Nora. Here is shelter for you; here I will protect you like a hunted dove that I have saved from a hawk's claws; I will bring peace to your poor beating heart. It will come, little by little, Nora, believe me. Tomorrow morning you will look upon it all quite differently; soon everything will be just as it was before. Very soon you won't need me to assure you that I have forgiven you; you will yourself fe el the certainty that I have done so. Can you suppose I should ever think of such a thing as repudiating you, or even reproaching you? You have no idea what a tr ue man's heart is like, Nora. There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying, to a man, in the knowledge that he has forgiven his wife— wife—forgiven

her freely, and with all his heart. It seems as if that had made her, as it were, doubly his own; he has given her a new life, so to speak; and she is in a way become both wife and child to him. So you shall be for me after this, my little scared, helpless darling. Have no anxiety about anything, Nora; only be frank and open with me, and I will serve as will and conscience both to you—. What is this? Not gone to bed? Have you changed your things? The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov TROFIMOV (18-29): All Russia is our orchard. The earth is broad and beautiful. There are many marvelous places. Think for a moment, Anya: your grandfather, your great-grandfather – all your forebears –they were the masters of serfs. They owned living souls. Can’t you see human faces, looking out at you from behind every tree-trunk in the orchard – from every leaf and every cherry? Can’t you hear their voices? The possession of living souls – it’s changed something deep in all of you, hasn’t it. So that your mother and you and your uncle don’t even notice you’re living on credit, at the expense of others – at the expense of people you don’t allow past the front hall… We’re two hundred years behind the times at least. We still have nothing – no properly defined attitude to the past. We just philosophise away, and complain about our boredom or drink vodka. But it’s only too clear that to start living in the present we have to redeem our past – we have to break with it. And it can be redeemed only by suffering, only by the most unheard-of, unceasing labour. You must understand that, Anya. Throw the keys down the well, and go. Be free as the wind. Have faith in me, Anya! Have faith in me ! I’m not thirty yet – I’m young – I’m still a student – but I’ve borne so much already! Every winter I’m hungry, sick and fearful, as poor as a beggar. And the places I’ve been to! The places where fate has driven me! And all the time, at eve ry minute of the day and night, my soul has been filled with premonitions I can’t e xplain or describe. I have a premonition of happiness, Anya. I can just see it now. The Seagull by Anton Chekhov TREPLEV (25): She loves me – she loves me not…She loves me – she loves me not… Loves me, loves me not. (laughs) There you are – she doesn’t love me. Well, of course she doesn’t. She wants to live and love and dre ss in light colours, and there am I, twenty-five years old, perpetually reminding her that she’s stopped being young. When I’m not there she’s thirty-two – when I am she’s forty-three; and that’s why she hates me. Then again I don’t acknowledge the theatre. She loves the theatre – she thinks she’s serving humanity and the sacred cause of art, whereas in my view the modern theatre is an anthology of stereotypes and received ideas. When the curtain goes up, and there, in a room with three walls lit by artificial lighting because it’s always evening, these great artists, these high priests in the temple of art, demonstrate how people eat and drink, how they love and walk about and wear their suits; when out of these banal scenes and trite words they attempt to extract a moral – some small and simple moral with a hundred household uses; when under a thousand different disguises they keep serving me up the same old thing, the same old thing, the same old thing – then I run and don’t stop running, just as Maupassant ran from the sight of the Eiffel Tower, that weighed on his brain with its sheer vulgarity. What we need are new artistic forms. And if we don’t get new forms it would be better if we had nothing at all.

The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov ANDREI (20-30): Oh, what has become of my past and where is it? I used to be young, happy, clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to m e full of hope. Why do we almost before we have begun to live, become dull, gray, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy?... This town has already been in existence for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom is in any way different from the others. There has never bee n, now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar, an artist, a man of even the slightest eminence who might arouse envy or a passionate desire to be emulated. They only eat, drink, sleep, and then they die… more people are born and also eat, drink, sleep, and so as not to become half-witted out of sheer boredom, they try to make life many-sided with their beastly back-biting, vodka, cards, and litigation. The wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands lie, and pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and the evil influence irresistibly oppresses the children and the divine spark in them is extinguished, and they become just as pitiful corpses and just as much like one another as their fathers and mothers… Hay Fever  by Noel Coward The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by William Inge – boyish monologue