1 · Why one performer is the hardest place to hide

Most people meet the solo show as a curiosity: the one-hander, the fringe piece, the actor's calling card. That framing is backwards, and it is why this is the first course in the series rather than a late specialism.

A monodrama removes every structural crutch at once.

• No scene partner, so no dialogue to hide exposition inside.
• No second character, so nobody else can want something on your behalf.
• No cutaway, no B-plot, no subplot to change the subject when the main one sags.
• No ensemble, so no one to cover a weak passage with stage business.

What is left is the story and one person telling it. If the story does not work, there is nothing on stage to disguise that. Which makes it the best diagnostic instrument in the form. Writers who can hold an audience alone can hold one with help. The reverse is not reliably true.

What you will be able to do at the end

• Name the change and the owner of any story, including your own, in one sentence each.
• Decide who your audience is to your speaker, which is the question that determines tone, tense, and what may be said aloud.
• Build a place and a time with language alone, on an empty stage.
• Choose deliberately between scene and summary instead of drifting into whichever comes easily.
• Place a turn (the moment the story's direction changes: one of the six shared terms Lesson 2 defines) and write an ending that is about the change rather than merely stopping.
• Finish a performable draft.

What this course is not. It is not a performance course. Standing in a room, direct address as a physical problem, staging with nothing, and rehearsing alone are Monodrama II. It is also not a course in autobiography: your own life is a legitimate source and it is not the only one, and Lesson 4 is blunt about why "it really happened" is not an argument for keeping something.

The vocabulary is shared across this whole series and is deliberately small. Six terms, defined in Lesson 2, used in every course that follows. Where theatre has its own traditional word for one of them, this course names the traditional word and then keeps using the shared one, so that a learner moving from here to the documentary or news courses is not learning a third dialect for the same idea.

A note on the examples. Every play named in this course exists and can be read or watched. Where the course says a play does something, that is a claim you can check by reading it, which is the only kind of claim worth making about craft.

Sources

• Bonney, J. (Ed.). (2000). Extreme exposure: An anthology of solo performance texts from the twentieth century. Theatre Communications Group.
• Brook, P. (1968). The empty space. MacGibbon & Kee.