Help me choose a piece

[midknightexpres]

Hello. I'm a high school senior and I'm out for speech. I do serious prose. Last year I did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for my speech and I ended up getting 2nd at conferences. Anyway, I need help and/or suggestions as to what to do for competitions this year. Post your favorite scenes from your favorite books/plays/whatever and help me choose a good dramatic scene. The scene has to last about 10 minutes, and it doesn't matter if it's lengthy because I can always cut a little here or there.

Thanks for your help guys! :D

[Scheherazade]

Can you explain how this thing works and what the purpose is? Not being familiar with the American eduation system, I am having difficulty to understand what you exactly need to be doing... :)

[midknightexpres]

The speech team is an extracuricular activity. We go to competitions to compete in our individual events. My event is serious prose (lamens terms a piece with a dramatic sense). What I do is stand in front of everyone and act out a scene from a play or a piece of literature for an audience. I'm rated on several different things including the piece itself and how I deliver the material.

It's just acting out everyone from a scene for people. It usually runs anywhere from 8-10 minutes. What I'm asking for is what your guys' favorite dramatic scenes are. That's it.

Like last year, I did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I did the scene where Buck and Big Papa start talking about stuff. Buck is a drunk and is just drinking his life away because he blames himself for his best friend's suicide. Papa just had a life scare because he thought he was going to die from cancer. The family decides not to tell that he's going to die because it's his birthday. While Papa guts out all of Buck's problems, Buck decides to get even and inform Papa that he is in fact going to die. Papa gets mad and labels everyone "lyin' liars".

It all involved a lot of character development (I had to play them both at the same time) and practice. At first it's calm, but then the drama of it all just erupts and that's when the fun begins (for me anyway).

Answer your question?

[Sitaram]

Around 1965, I watched an old movie version of Cyrano de Bergerac, and the final scene of the movie was so moving, that I immediately sat down and wrote the following poem, as quickly as I could write:

"A Summer Evening Lives Into the Night"

The subtle shades of laurel leaves abides
The red of roses laughing at their side
The brambles' acridness
The petals' sweetness
The scent of grass fresh crushed
In gentle drifting through the visions
Drifting through the languid rush
Of moons and clouds in shadowy collisions
A star through velvet shifting
The hush of breathing lifting to the night.

The lightness of your lips,
The caustic after-image of their touch,
The laughter of my fingertips
Dancing down your face.

Memories in dreams go dancing
Clutching hand in hand it seems
The blush of cheeks seren enhancing
Red remembering of green.

So roses wilt and fall from too much laughing.
The green of laurel leaves outlives them all,
The summer's flame,
The frost of early fall,
The winter's call begetting
The blame in each sun setting,
The gaping Spring raped green
By passion's budding breath,

The falling-fashioned, hushed serene
Of age,
Of death.

============
A google.com search reveals that the movie I saw was made in 1950, staring Jose Ferrar.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042367/

[Scheherazade]

Thanks for the explanation, midknight :)

How about Shylock's famous speech from 'Merchant of Venice'? One of my all time favorites...

SHYLOCK.
To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will
feed my revenge. He hath disgrac'd me and hind'red me half a
million; laugh'd at my losses, mock'd at my gains, scorned my
nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies. And what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed
and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If
you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we
not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you
in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance
be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villaiy you teach me
I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the
instruction.


(http://www.allshakespeare.com/merchant/37480)

[mono]

Hmm, how difficult to choose. Both Sitaram's and Scher's ideas prove worthy of praise if I saw someone on stage performing them.
I suppose something popular, but not over-done seems necessary, along with something very entertaining, considering that you mentioned you perform solo.
The visit of Marley's ghost to Ebenezer Scrooge with perhaps the ghosts following may work in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Or you could try the concluding fight, at the very end of the play, between MacBeth and MacDuff in Shakespeare's MacBeth, and when MacDuff crowns Malcolm as king.
If you felt very enthusiastic about playing a few challenging characters, you could attempt almost anything from Ovid Metamorphoses, such as the meeting of Pyramus and Thisbe, the dialogue and action between Icarus (during his fall) and Daedalus, the chasing and changing of Daphne and Apollo, or the tragic story of Echo with her curse for falling in love.
Good luck!

[Sitaram]

Or.... Take a look at the very short (2 pages) book in the Apocrypha entitled something like "Daniel and Susanna" which is the story of two men who falsely accuse Susanna of adultery (which was punishable by death.) The prophet Daniel comes along, questions her accusers separately, and uncovers a discrepancy in their false testimony.

But... then read the most beautiful, lyrical poem which Wallace Stevens wrote about Susanna, entitled:


"Peter Quince at the Clavier."

-I-
JUST as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music too.

Music is feeling then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel, 5
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:

Of a green evening, clear and warm, 10
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their being throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. 15

-II-
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found 20
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed
For so much melody.

Upon the bank she stood
In the cool 25
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass, 30
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering. 35

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned—
A cymbal crashed,
And roaring horns. 40

-III-
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side:

And as they whispered, the refrain 45
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then the simpering Byzantines,
Fled, with a noise like tambourines. 50

-IV-
Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going, 55
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral. 60

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory, 65
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.



http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2015.html

(here are some useful footnotes on the poem)

1] Peter Quince, one of the bumbling rustics in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream who put on a well-meant but unintentionally funny play of the tragic love of Pyramus and Thisbe for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Stevens recognized this in a late letter (Letters, 786).


9] Susanna: as told in the apocryphal book of Daniel (chapter 13), this virtuous wife of Joakim in Babylon rejected the sexual demands of two old men of the tribe, who then calumniated her in revenge. Daniel discovered they were lying and had them executed.


15] pizzicati: the sound of plucked strings.
Hosanna: "pray, save us" (Greek).


41] tambourines: thin handheld drum with jingling metal trickets on the edges.


42] Byzantines: servants originating in the post-Roman Byzantine empire (an anachronism).


58] cowl: hood (as of a monk).


59] auroral: dawn.

[Scheherazade]

Antony's speech from 'Julius Ceasar'? The whole scene is very good;maybe you can cut and trim Antony's speeches, turning into a long soliloquy..

ANTONY
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men--
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.


(http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.2.html)

[byquist]

That is weird for one person to be playing two characters in a scene. But if you played Brick and Big Daddy you took on a demanding performance piece. Someone suggested Antony's "Friends ..." I'd suggest Antony's speech over the body of Caesar. Go rent the black-and-white film where Marlon Brando "chews the furniture up" with this speech - really powerful.

If you do the 2-person thing, it might be interesting for one person to be unusual and the other to be regular. I'm thinking of Rhinoceros, where this guy is turning into a Rhino before your eyes. If the speeches fit, that could be stunning. It's by French playwright, Giradoux, no another guy, just can't recall his name this second. Also wrote "Exit the King" look him up on the internet. Ionesco, that's him. Hope this helps a little. Rhinoceros could be fun, because it is very physical. You turn into the rhino very gradually.