Help- seeking a good play/character!!

[dramasnot6]

A friend of mine taking Senior Drama Studies has been assigned a major task to perform a monologue he finds within a published play. He hasn't read any drama though, and is having a lot of trouble finding a good play with a character he wants to play.
He likes unsavoury characters and intense, dark plots/themes.

Know any good plays, and more specifically, any good characters/particular scenes or monologues that at least somewhat fit this?
Thanks soooooo much in advance to anyone who can help!

P.S. He explicitly said- "I will try anything, but NO Shakespeare!" :lol:

[Bakiryu]

Darn it! i was about to suggest ♥Hamlet♥, oh well!

[JBI]

Try the Miser by Moliere

[jon1jt]

A friend of mine taking Senior Drama Studies has been assigned a major task to perform a monologue he finds within a published play. He hasn't read any drama though, and is having a lot of trouble finding a good play with a character he wants to play.
He likes unsavoury characters and intense, dark plots/themes.

Know any good plays, and more specifically, any good characters/particular scenes or monologues that at least somewhat fit this?
Thanks soooooo much in advance to anyone who can help!

P.S. He explicitly said- "I will try anything, but NO Shakespeare!" :lol:

I taught a senior drama once and have just the role for him: Alan or Martin Dysart the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer's Equus.

There are so so many great scenes, I seriously recommend that he read the play first, it's a quick read, 108pp.

Here's an intense moment with Dysart coming at the end of the play, a monologue. Hope this helps.

--------
Hesther: The boy's in pain, Martin.
Martin Dysart: Yes.
Hesther: And you can take it away.
Dysart: Yes.
Hesther: Then that has to be enough for you, surely?...In the end!
Dysart: (crying out): All right! I'll take it away! He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him!...My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, hoeever, is more likely to make a ghost!...Let me tell you exactly what I'm going to do to him!
[ He steps out of the square and walks round the upstage end of it, storming at the audience]
I'll heal the rash on his body. I'll ease the welts cut into his mind by flying manes. When that's done, I'l set him on a nice mini scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world where animals are treated properly: made extinct, or put into servitude, or tethered all their lives in dim light, just to feed it! I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them -blinking out nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shrivelling heads! I'll take away his Field of Ha Ha, and give him Normal places for his ecstasy-multi-lane highways driven through the guts of cities, extinguishing Place altogether, even the idea of Place! He'll trot on his metal pony tamely through the concrete evening - and one thing I promise you: he will never touch hide again! With any luck his private parts will come to feel as plastic to him as the producs of the factory to which he will almost certainly be sent. Who knows? He may even come to find sex funny. Smirky funny. Bit of grunt funny. Trampled and furtive and entirely in control. Hopefully he'll feel nothing at his fork but Approved Flesh. I doubt, however, with much passion! ...Passion you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created...
[He addresses ALAN directly, in farewell]
You won't gallop any more, Alan. Horses will be quite safe. You'll save your pennies every week, till you can change that scooter for a car, and put the odd 50p on the gee-gees, quite forgetting that they were ever anything more to you than bearers of little profits and little losses. You will, however, be without pain. More or less completely without pain..."

[mayneverhave]

I was also going to suggest Equus.

How bout "Look Back in Anger" by John Osborne.

[dramasnot6]

Thank you so much everyone!!
I can't believe I didn't think of Equus- I read it and saw the movie in 8th grade and loved it. That is a brilliant scene Jon, and a perfect monologue! He loved it!

Lots of thanks to mayneverhave and JBI too- he is now looking into Equus but he says those look like some great alternatives.