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Blood Moon?  Boring!

Who saw the super moon earlier this week?  And did you join the growing national trend and step outside at 8 p.m. sharp to howl along with your neighbors?  Not only is a nightly howl a great voice exercise, but “it’s a beautiful, connected, cathartic feeling,” Amy Kalish told the Los Angeles Times.  “We know we're not alone.”

The moon has always been a muse for artists, including actors, musicians, writers, and more.  And it’s the inspiration for today’s “emotional” monologue.

“Blood Moon?  Boring!” from Ups and Downs explores the old trope of a kid unimpressed with what most of us — including the kid’s parents — consider a pretty thrilling astronomical occurrence.  But after the kid’s dad tells an interesting fact about blood moons, the kid’s feelings about the whole matter change just a bit.

Since this monologue is meant to explore emotions, the kid’s “feelings” are entirely up to you — or rather, a six-sided die.  While the appendix for Ups and Downs includes a list of more than 100 emotions, here’s a list of six of those emotions:

1. shocked
2. willing
3. humiliated
4. adventurous
5. cranky
6. anxious

Teachers, for a fun distance-learning lesson, we suggest having students roll a six-sided die and then act out the monologue using the corresponding emotion.  For example, if they roll a “3,” they would feel “humiliated.”  (Every kid knows how to feel “humiliated” in the presence of parents!)

Feel free to have students roll the dice on their emotions more than once, and see if together you can identify how young actors need to change the tone of their voice, their facial expressions, and their body language to communicate distinct feelings.

Besides 20 monologues that can be played with more than 100 different emotions, Ups and Downs also has 30 sets of paired monologues from different perspectives and 20 monologues with two different suggested scenarios.  That’s a total of 70 monologues that can be played in hundreds of different ways, with different emotions and/or perspective!

Teachers, keep encouraging your students to sign up for our newsletter here.  For more tips on how to share these monologues with students or guidelines about sharing monologue performances with us, see our last Monologue Mania newsletter.

We’re still waiting to see your videos, though we love the feedback we’ve been getting about Monologue Mania! Be sure to tell us more about how you’re using these monologues in your own virtual and distance learning plans.

For more monologues, resources, lesson plan ideas, promotions, contests, and more, follow the Pioneer Drama newsletter and visit us online to see how we are Touching Lives Through Theatre...  Together™.

Here is today’s monologue:

https://www.PioneerDrama.com/Newsletter/Teaching_Resources/Blood_Moon_Boring-Kid.pdf