Monologues for teens: free pieces for auditions

Someone has asked your teenager for a monologue. A drama school, an agent, a youth theatre, a casting for a film. Now there is a search history full of "monologues for teens" and a growing suspicion that everything out there is either a famous film speech every other applicant will also do, or a poem in disguise.

I have been on both sides of this. I did the audition-piece hunt as a young actor, and I have sat through a lot of other people's pieces since. So we wrote some. Four short pieces for teenagers, free to use, at /practice/monologues. This post is about what the people asking usually want, which of the four might fit, and how your teen can rehearse one without a partner or a coach.

What schools and agents ask for

The request is usually less specific than it sounds, and the details that matter are the ones in the email.

Length first. Most requests want something short, around a minute or two. Longer is not better. A panel that has seen forty applicants that day is not looking for stamina. If they give a time limit, stay under it.

Then the type. "Contemporary" means written recently, in language a person would actually speak. "Classical" usually means Shakespeare or his neighbours, and if they want one they will say so. Many schools ask for one of each. Agents and film castings almost always want contemporary, and they want to see the teenager, not a character three times their age.

Then the practical notes. Do they want it filmed or in the room? Is there a slate? Do they need the text sent in advance? If the piece is from a published play, some places ask where it is from.

Two things they will not write down but will judge on. First, is the piece age appropriate, meaning does it belong in the mouth of a person this age. A fifteen-year-old playing a divorcing forty-year-old is a stretch nobody asked for. Second, is it a piece they have heard four hundred times. Well-known film speeches are a trap for exactly that reason.

If anything in the request is unclear, ask. That is true of every audition, and I said the same in audition prep for kids: a parent's checklist.

Four free teen monologues

These are original pieces, written for this age, and free to use in an audition or a class. Each one has its own page with the full text, so your teen can read all four in ten minutes and see which one bites.

The ferry ticket is dramatic, for a girl of about fifteen to seventeen. She has bought one ticket, not two, and she is telling her best friend why.

Group chat is comedic, for a girl of fourteen to seventeen. She is explaining to her mother, in detail, exactly how she got removed from the group chat.

The second goalkeeper is dramatic, for a boy of fifteen to eighteen. He is telling the coach he is not coming back next season, and why it is not about football.

Driving test is comedic, for a boy of sixteen to eighteen. He is explaining to the examiner why the roundabout was, on reflection, not entirely his fault.

The age brackets and the girl or boy labels are guidance, not rules. If your daughter reads The second goalkeeper and it is obviously hers, she should do it. Panels care far more about a piece landing than about the label on it.

The monologue page lists every free piece, and the main practice library has full scenes if the request is for a two-hander.

How to pick one

Let your teen pick. This is the single most useful thing a parent can do here. A monologue the actor chose is one they will fight for. One the parent chose is homework.

Within that, a few things I would say to a teenager choosing:

Pick something you understand on first reading. If you have to have the situation explained to you, the panel will see the explanation, not the piece.

Pick something with a turn in it. A good short monologue changes somewhere in the middle. The character wants one thing, then finds something out, then wants something else. That turn is what you get to act. A piece that is one emotion for ninety seconds gives you nowhere to go. All four of ours have one.

Pick the one that scares you slightly. Not the one that scares you a lot. Slightly.

Comedic or dramatic? If they asked for one, do that. If they did not, do the one you are better at, and be honest with yourself about which that is. A comic piece that lands is rarer than a serious one that does, and panels remember it.

If the request is for two pieces, make them different from each other. Different tone, different kind of person, different tempo. The contrast is the point.

How to rehearse it alone

A monologue is harder to rehearse than a scene, because there is nobody to bounce off. Your teen has to invent the other person, decide where they are standing and what their face is doing, and then talk to them. The full method is in how to rehearse a monologue alone. The short version, for a teenager with a piece and a bedroom:

Decide who you are talking to and put them somewhere in the room. A chair, a spot on the wall, a jacket on a hook. Look there. Never at the floor, never at the middle distance.

Break it into pieces. Draw a line across the page wherever the thought changes. Most short monologues have three or four such lines. Each piece gets its own job: convincing, apologising, remembering, whatever it is. Say the job out loud before each piece the first few times.

Move. Walk the piece around the room. Do it lying down. Do it while making a sandwich. The body finds things sitting still never does, and you get to keep the ones that work.

Learn the words last, or at least not first. Words learned before the sense is understood come out sounding learned. If the lines themselves are the sticking point, how to help your child learn lines is written for the parent side of that.

Record it and watch it back. Every teenager hates this. Do it anyway. Fix one thing per take, not everything.

If the monologue sits inside a scene, or your teen is working on any of the full scenes, this is where an app earns its place. blablabla is an app for learning lines: you import the script, choose your part, and it speaks every other character's lines while it waits for yours. It is the best app for learning lines for a play or a film when you want the scene to wait for you instead of the other way round. For a solo piece the useful part is the line visibility dial, which lets them run the text with the words shown, then only hinted, then first letters, then nothing, so the page comes away in stages instead of all at once. And if the audition is a tape, self tape tips for kids and teens covers the camera side.

The working actor's version of rehearsing without a partner is in the complete guide to rehearsing alone. Most of it applies at sixteen. The rest will by the time they need it.