Monologue lessons from two Denzels

Denzel Washington recently gave an interview in Backstage where he discusses auditioning, acting and his new film, The Great Debaters, and he talks at one point about a pivotal monologue in the film which a character delivers during a debate -- the character, James Farmer, Jr, played by Denzel Whitaker, shares a very personal story with the Harvard audiance during the film's climate debate scene, about how he felt when he witnessed a lynching.

The monologue is quite dramatic and emotional -- the character is telling something  highly personal, highly traumatic, and there's a couple of mistakes an actor can make with such a speech. One is to treat it just as a speech and the other is to try to relive the emotions you think the character must have had while they were witnessing the lynching while you're doing the monologue.

Denzel Washington provides some clear instruction about how to handle this type of monologue:

There was something about little Denzel; there were a lot of cute kids, like trained seals, who came in. He did the "In Texas they lynch Negroes" speech. It's a pivotal moment in the story where the character goes off book and just shares what he knows. And most of the kids came in with just that: a speech. And he did too. And I said, "Okay, stop. I know you haven't experienced this, but have you experienced something like this in your life?" And he told me a story about a kid who called him a dirty name and he got into a fight. And he almost got upset telling the story. So then I said, "Start the speech. Just tell me like you're telling me that story." And he said it very matter-of-factly. He got it, he did it, and I said, "That's where it's at. And what you just did is 10 times more powerful." (Denzel Washington, Backstage, 12 . 31 . 2007, "The Great One" interview).

I think the mistake an actor can make is getting sucked into the term "felt," i.e., the character is telling a story about how he felt. This is true, but how the character feels is only the end result of what he's really doing.

What James Farmer, Jr is doing is exactly what Denzel Washington told Denzel Whitaker to do -- "share what he knows" with the audience. The two parts of this direction to pay attention to are share and know, i.e., the experience changed James Farmer, Jr, and he learned something from that experience: the character shares what he learned, and it is often the the moment of telling a story about what happened to us that we discover, in that moment, what we learned and how it changed us -- in life, that's the purpose of talking, of sharing . . .