The Speech
- Comedy
- Monologue
- 3 min
- No gender marker
- Adult
- Intermediate
Casting
7 lines- MOI No gender marker, Adult your role
Excerpt
MOI
Right. The big day. My brother’s wedding. I am the best man. Three hundred people in front of me, a microphone, and one mission: not to be that guy. You know the one, the one people still talk about twenty years later. “Do you remember the best man?”
I prepared. Oh, I prepared. I have cards. Numbered. A plan: one touching anecdote, one joke, a second joke in case the first one dies, and an ending that makes the aunts cry. Foolproof.
Card number one. The touching anecdote. “When my brother was six…” And that is when I realise I have absolutely no memory of what he did at six. Six is a black hole. I wrote “touching anecdote” and never filled in the rest.
What you can do with it
Original text written for Acto. Read it, print it, work on it in class, perform it at an audition or on a self-tape: that is what it is for, and you need no permission. For a public performance or any commercial use, write to us at contact@acto.re.
In these selections
The same text, elsewhere
Close to this one
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The Nose Speech
Ah no! It’s a bit short, young man! You could have said… oh, Lord!… any number of things… Aggressive: “Sir, if I had such a nose, I’d have it amputated on the spot!”
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The Speech
Dear all. Dearest all. Dear… deaR. Right. Let me start over. Good evening. I’m the best man. Well, “the” best man: there are four of us, but I’m the one talking. The others got scared.
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The Chair
I invited the chair to sit down. Out of politeness. It declined. A chair that refuses to sit puts you right back in your place. We’ve lived together for three years. It doesn’t judge me. It…