How to Keep Several Monologues Audition-Ready

The audition notice lands on a Thursday for a Monday slot: one classical, one contemporary, and be prepared to offer something else if asked. You have pieces. You had a lovely Viola last spring and a contemporary speech you did in class. But when you try the Viola in the kitchen, you get two lines in and stall.

It’s easy to learn a monologue for one audition, do it, and let it go. The pieces don’t vanish, but they slide out of reach just when you need them on short notice. Keeping several audition-ready is less about learning more and more about upkeep: a few minutes a week, done the right way.

The short version: decide on a small active set, check each piece by saying it from memory rather than reading it, space those checks so the gaps grow, and refresh an old piece on your feet with its blocking before you ever open the script. The research on memory backs the checking, spacing, and refresh steps, and the whole routine fits in less time than one rehearsal.

Decide how many pieces you need on call

There is no single rule, but the requirements of schools tell you what “ready” can mean. For its 2022-23 cycle, Juilliard’s acting program asked for four memorized monologues, two in heightened text and two contemporary, each about two minutes. CalArts asks for two contrasting pieces under two minutes each, plus one more held in reserve for faculty to request.

For working auditions, Carmichael Phillip in Acting Magazine suggests “at least two to three audition-ready monologues,” with a larger collection of six to ten across genres and periods for growth. He also makes the point that matters most here: a few pieces you know cold beat a long list you half know.

So think in tiers rather than one number:

• The active set: three or four pieces you could do tomorrow: for example, a classical and a contemporary piece that between them show comic and serious, plus one spare.
• The back shelf: pieces you’ve performed before and could have back in a few days with a short refresh.
• The reading pile: speeches you like but haven’t learned yet, ready to promote when a notice calls for something new.

If you’re still building the set, our guide to choosing contrasting monologues covers what makes two pieces different enough to show range.

Check by saying it, not by reading it

The tempting way to keep a piece fresh is to read it over on the train. It feels productive, because the words look familiar. But familiarity on the page is not the same as recall in a room where nobody hands you the first line.

Memory research is blunt about this. In Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke’s 2006 study, described in a Washington University release, students who studied a passage once and then took three recall tests recalled 61% of it a week later. Students who only restudied recalled 40%, even though they had read it about 14 times to the testers’ 3.4.

A large review of study methods by John Dunlosky and colleagues, summarized by the APS, reached the same verdict: practice testing and spacing your practice out got the top rating, while rereading and highlighting were rated low. For an actor, the test is simple. Say the piece out loud before you look at anything.

The two-minute recall check

Stand up, give yourself the moment before, and run the speech at full voice without the text. Don’t stop when you stumble. Mark the spot in your head, push on, and only then open the script to see what you lost. Those spots are the only parts you need to drill.

If you can’t get started at all, use a halfway prompt: the first letter of each word. Here is the start of Viola’s speech from Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2, as it appears in the Project Gutenberg text:

VIOLA: I left no ring with her; what means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
She made good view of me, indeed, so much,
That methought her eyes had lost her tongue,

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 2

And the same lines as a recall prompt:

I l n r w h; w m t l? / F f m o h n c h! / S m g v o m, i, s m, / T m h e h l h t,

The letters give you the rhythm and the shape without handing you the words, so you still do the work of remembering. You can turn any of your pieces into cues like these with our free first-letter memorizer, and the full speech, with run times and cut points, is on our page for “I left no ring with her.” Use the letters only until you can start cold, then drop them.

Space your runs, and let the gaps grow

How often should you run a piece? The research on spacing gives a useful rule of thumb, though not a timetable. In a study of more than 1,350 people, Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues found that the best gap between review sessions depended on how long you needed to remember. As their 2008 paper’s abstract puts it, the ideal gap was about 20% of the wait for a test a few weeks out, falling to about 5% for a test a year away.

An audition piece is a strange case: you don’t know when the test is. It could be Monday, or it could be in five months. That argues for steady, modest gaps rather than cramming before each notice. One workable approach is to run each piece in your active set about once a week, and each back-shelf piece every few weeks.

Here is one workable weekly rotation for an active set of four pieces. It’s a practical plan built on the spacing and testing research, not a schedule any study tested:

1. Monday: recall check on piece one, full voice, no script. Drill only the lines you dropped.
2. Tuesday: recall check on piece two, the same way.
3. Wednesday: recall check on piece three.
4. Thursday: recall check on piece four.
5. Friday: run the two pieces you’d most likely pair at an audition, back to back, with a slate and the walk between them.
6. Weekend: one back-shelf piece, cold. If it comes back clean, push its next check out a few weeks; if it doesn’t, give it a refresh session.

That’s about ten minutes on a weekday. When a piece runs clean three weeks in a row, it’s earned a longer gap. When it starts to slip, shorten the gap again. You’re letting the misses set the schedule, which builds on spaced practice.

Refresh an old piece on your feet

The good news about the Viola you stalled on in the kitchen: it’s not gone. Hermann Ebbinghaus, who first measured forgetting in the 1880s, used a measure called savings: how much less time or effort it takes to relearn something than it took to learn it the first time. A 2015 replication by Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros uses the same idea. If a list took 25 repetitions to learn and 20 to relearn, the savings is 20%.

For actors, the more striking evidence comes from Helga and Tony Noice. In a 1997 study, they tested professional actors three months after they had stopped performing a role, and after they had learned new roles in the meantime. On the first try, the actors recalled more than 85% of the text word for word, or close to it.

The bigger finding is what helped with the rest. When the actors retried the material they’d missed while moving about the set, they recovered 84% of it. When they retried it sitting down, they recovered only 15%. The movements they had used in performance pulled the words back.

So when you bring back an old monologue, don’t start at a desk with the script. Start with your body.

A refresh session for a piece you haven’t touched in months

1. Before you look at anything, stand in your space and do the opening of the piece the way you staged it: where you looked, where you moved, what you reached for.
2. Run as much as you can from memory, on your feet, at full voice. Keep going through gaps.
3. Only now open the script. Mark exactly what you lost and what came back changed.
4. Drill only the marked lines, out loud, from the line before each one.
5. Run the whole piece again without the script, moving as you did before.
6. Do one more cold run the next day. A piece that survives the overnight gap is back in the set.

Pay close attention to step three. An old piece can come back with small errors, a word swapped or a phrase smoothed over. Our guide to relearning a role covers that kind of drift in detail.

Use quick self-tests between runs

Out loud, on your feet, stays the default for every recall check. Quiet quizzing is the fallback: on a day when you can’t speak at full voice, on a train or late at night, go through the piece silently with the text out of sight, then do the out-loud check the next day you can.

If you keep your monologues in Offbook, upload each one as a PDF, a PNG or JPEG image, or a text file and use its memorization tools for these checks. You can hide your lines entirely, swap them for first-letter cues (anywhere from one to eight letters of each word), or show only the first word of each line, as the video below shows. When a piece runs clean with cues, hide the whole script for a final test.

Whatever you use, keep the rule the same: try to produce the words first, then check. A tool that shows you the text before you’ve tried is just rereading with extra steps.

Keep the acting fresh, not just the words

A piece you’ve run fifty times can be word-perfect and dead. Weekly checks protect the lines, but they can also lock in one reading, the same pause in the same place every time. If the auditors ask for an adjustment, a piece frozen in one shape is hard to bend.

Juilliard’s FAQ warns against picking pieces from monologue books without reading the entire play, so that you understand the character’s circumstances, and who they are talking to and why. That knowledge is what lets you change a reading on the spot. Once a month, use one of your weekly runs to play the piece a different way:

• Change who you’re talking to: a friend, a rival, someone who doesn’t want to hear it.
• Change what you want from them by the end of the speech.
• Change the physical starting point: sitting instead of standing, still instead of pacing.
• Play it at half the size, as if the listener were a foot away.

Keep the words exact while everything else moves. Then go back to your chosen reading for the next audition, with a few new options in your pocket.

Know when to retire a piece

Phillip’s advice is to replace monologues that no longer resonate with you or no longer challenge you. Other good reasons: you’ve aged out of the character, your type has shifted, or you notice you only run it out of habit. Retiring a piece doesn’t mean forgetting it. Move it to the back shelf, promote something from your reading pile, and start that one’s weekly checks.

Questions actors ask

How many monologues should an actor have ready?

Enough to cover what your auditions ask for, plus one spare. For many actors that means three or four in the active set: classical and contemporary, comic and serious. Drama school applicants should check each program’s list, since some ask for four and others ask for two plus a reserve.

How often should I rehearse my audition monologues?

We suggest a short out-loud recall check about once a week per active piece, with longer gaps for pieces that run clean and shorter gaps for pieces that slip. A short recall check does more than a long session of reading over the text.

Can I use the same monologue for years?

Yes, if it still fits your age and type and it still feels alive when you do it. The risk is not the piece but the reading going stale, so vary it in practice now and then, and retire it once it stops challenging you.

What if I’m asked for a piece I haven’t run in months?

If you have a day or two, do the refresh session above: on your feet, with your old blocking, before you open the script. If you have no time, offer a piece from your active set instead. Doing a ready piece well is better than doing a rusty one in the room.