Where to find monologues, sides and scenes to work on

You need something to work on this week. Not for an audition with sides already attached, but for practice: a piece to take into a class, or to keep a muscle warm, or to have ready when somebody asks what you have.

Finding one is a surprisingly annoying problem, and it is annoying for a specific reason. The places that hold the most material are not built for actors, and the places built for actors hold less of it than you would expect.

Decide what you are looking for before you go looking

Three things get called “material” and they are not interchangeable.

A monologue is a speech you can perform alone. It is what a drama school or a general meeting asks for, and it has to work with nobody else in the room.

Sides are the pages of a scene sent with an audition. You do not go and find sides. They find you, and when people say they are looking for sides to practise with, what they usually want is a scene they can treat like sides.

A scene is two or more people talking. It is the most useful thing to rehearse and the hardest to organise, because it needs somebody else.

Knowing which of the three you want saves you an hour, because the sources are different for each.

The free end: work old enough to be out of copyright

Anything published long enough ago is in the public domain, which means you can read it, print it, cut it and perform it without asking anyone.

Project Gutenberg is the largest general collection of it. Its own description is “a library of 79,343 free eBooks”, “100% Free - No fees, no registration, completely free”, holding works whose “U.S. copyright has expired”. That includes a great deal of theatre: Shakespeare, the Greeks, Ibsen, Chekhov in older translations, Wilde, Shaw, Restoration comedy, and a long tail of nineteenth-century plays nobody performs any more.

The tail is the interesting part. Everyone knows where the famous speeches are, and everyone in the room has heard them. A play from 1890 that has not been revived since is the same amount of work to read and a completely different experience for whoever is listening.

Two practical warnings. Translations carry their own copyright, so a modern Chekhov is not free even though Chekhov is, and the older translation you can get for nothing often reads stiffly out loud. And a speech that works on the page does not always work in the mouth: read it aloud before you commit to it, because Victorian sentence construction can be very hard to land.

The lending end: books you can borrow rather than buy

Open Library describes itself as “an open, editable library catalog” with “millions of books available through Controlled Digital Lending”. In practice that means scanned books you borrow for a period, the way you would from a library, rather than files you keep.

This is where anthologies live. Collections of monologues and scenes, published in volumes, are the traditional way actors found material before the internet, and a lot of them exist as borrowable scans. Whether you need an account to borrow is not stated on the front page, so expect to make one.

Your actual local library is worth the same paragraph. Drama sections are usually small, frequently unvisited, and full of exactly this.

The publishers: where current plays live

Plays written in the last several decades are licensed rather than free, and they are held by theatrical publishers. Concord Theatricals and Dramatists Play Service are the two names you will run into most in the English-speaking world. Playscripts, which used to be a third, now redirects to Concord.

What licensing means in practice is worth understanding before you are surprised by it. Reading a play is not the thing that needs permission. Performing it in public is. So working on a scene at home, or in a class, sits in a different category from putting it in front of a paying audience, and the second one is what a licence is for.

Go and look at both. What you want to find out is whether they let you read a sample before buying, and how their acting editions are priced, because those two answers decide how much browsing you can afford.

The databases: built for this, and smaller than you hope

StageAgent is one of the sites that index material by what an actor needs rather than by author. It offers “monologues - find audition-ready monologues for actors of all ages” and scenes as a separate resource, and states “character breakdowns: 28,059”. It does not say on its front page how many monologues that translates to, or what a free account gets you, so treat both as things to check rather than assume.

The general shape of these sites is worth knowing. They index and describe; they mostly do not hold the text. A database will tell you that a play has a two-minute speech for a woman in her twenties, and then you still have to get the play.

That is not a complaint. Knowing a piece exists is most of the problem, and it is the part the public-domain collections handle worst, because they are organised by author and title rather than by what is inside them.

The hard one: scenes for two, when there is only one of you

Monologues are a solved problem. Scenes are not, and it is worth being clear about why.

A two-hander needs a second person, which means scheduling, which is why the scene you meant to work on all month is still sitting there. The workarounds are all imperfect, and it helps to know what each one costs.

You can pick a scene where the other part is short, so the weight sits on you and the other person has less to carry. You can pick one where the other character is doing something transactional, because a scene with a receptionist or a doctor in it survives a flat reading in a way a scene with a lover does not. You can record the other lines and play them back, which is more useful than it sounds and less useful than a person. Or you can find someone, which is the only version that gets you the thing a scene is actually for, which is another human being changing what you do.

If you want scenes specifically, look at plays with small casts. A two-hander, a three-hander, a play set in one apartment. They are shorter to read, they are full of the thing you want, and you do not have to hunt through a cast of twenty to find two people alone in a room.

What makes a piece worth the week

Some pieces reward rehearsal and some do not, and you can usually tell early.

Something has to change. A speech where the character finishes in the state they started gives you nothing to play. A speech where they arrive somewhere they did not expect gives you a week of work.

It has to be aimed at somebody. Even a soliloquy has a target: the audience, a god, a version of themselves. A speech with nobody on the other end flattens out no matter how well you say it.

It should be within reach of your casting without being identical to it. A piece that is exactly who you are shows nothing. A piece three decades and a continent away shows a costume. Somewhere in between is where the work is.

And it has to survive a camera. Some material is built for a stage and dies in a close-up on a phone. If you intend to record it, read it once to camera before you spend a month on it, because that is the format most of your practice will end up in.

Where to start if you want an answer now

Take the shortest path. Open Project Gutenberg, search for a playwright you have never performed, and read one play. That is a free afternoon and a real piece by the end of it.

If you would rather have the material chosen for you, a database will narrow it faster, and you should expect to buy the play afterwards.

And if what you actually want is a scene rather than a speech, do the harder thing first and find the person. Everything else is available whenever you are. The second actor is the part with a diary.