At one point in my teaching career, the administration wanted to allow a newly formed semester-long drama class to substitute for a semester of English. With that in mind, I used critiques and play writing for the writing elements, ending the semester with scene work from well-known plays and I used Charles Aidman’s adaptation of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology as my source of monologues. I was able to buy a class set of the play, which I used for the better part of 30 years! Of course, I had to replace some. After we spent the better part of seven weeks on technical theatre, as well as group improv, vocal and mime activities, we began to work with monologues. By this time everyone was comfortable with getting up in front of the class Today, there are excellent monologue books available for middle school as well as high school actors. Meriwether Publishing has many to choose from. The way I approached Spoon River can be adapted to any monologue books. As I’ve stated in my book — more than a couple of times! — a play is about people, so my major concern with young actors was to work with character. The Ten Day Assignment Day One: I discussed the characters in general. These people represented a whole town in the middle of the 1800s including crooked politicians, ladies of the evening and drunks. I always told my students that to play these roles was such fun because in real life we weren’t these people. If the students knew their parents would object to them playing disreputable characters, then they had over 50 characters to pick from. (One parent called and informed me that his daughter was not going to play a whore!) The students were then to read the script and write down 3 characters they would like to be. Day Two: They continued reading and then selected who would be which character. I had prepared ahead of time a list of all the characters, the pages their solo appeared on and for those that had 10 lines or fewer I marked in bold. Most of the characters had between 16 and 20 lines. I wanted the students to all be on a level playing ground and if a student chose a character from the bolded list, they knew they would be graded differently. Then it was time to decide which student got which character. I started reading down the list. If only one student raised their hand when a character’s name was read, they would get that character. If two or more students wanted a specific character, I would select a number between 1 and 20 and the one who came closest would get it. I felt that was the fairest way of deciding. Often after going through the whole list some students would change their minds. When everyone had selected their solo they were to take out a clean sheet of paper, put the name of the character and the page he/she appeared on at the top and carefully copy the solo. This copy was used to read, memorize and write an analysis of their character so it had to be correct. If they did not have enough time, I was always available during lunch and after school for those students to come in and finish writing. Day Three: I first made sure every one was caught up — if some needed still more time to copy the piece, I allowed them to do so and had the rest of the class quietly start the memorization process. Next, once every one had their pieces copied, they were to read through the piece and make sure they understood what all the words meant. Then they were to turn their paper over — if there was not room at the bottom — and write a concise paraphrase of their piece. Of course, a discussion of paraphrasing was done. As this was poetry, sometimes it proved to be a very difficult assignment. When the students were done, I passed out my Making Memories sheet with tips on memorization and they were to either start or continue working on their memorization. Next time I will discuss the next four days of the unit. | 
