The Best Short Stage Monologues

Now Linus, I want you to take a good look at Charlie Brown's face. Would you please hold still a minute, Charlie Brown, I want Linus to study your face. Now, this is what you call a Failure Face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully, Linus.

You rarely see such a good example. Notice the deep lines, the dull, vacant look in the eyes. Yes, I would say this is one of the finest examples of a Failure Face that you're liable to see for a long while.

Act 1, Scene 1

I don’t get sleep but when I do, it’s always nightmares. I sit in a pit of an infinite amount of skulls, trying to remember their faces. I’m not scared, sad, angry or happy. Nothing makes sense and yet it doesn’t have to.

Pain is make-believe, destiny is fulfilled and life is had. I’ve left little memory in this expiring world. What’s so great about life?

Seriously. Happiness is a fleeting moment. Money? That’s pathetic. Our passions will never change anyone or anything. Love. We have no choice but to abandon them and they’ll return the favor.

God. He better not exist because I’m raging a war with the others and we’ll break down those gates! And what happens when you die after you die? Maybe god’s god has something better. I got to get myself a delusion.

Act 1, Scene 1

My aunt died of influenza, so they said. But it’s my belief they done the old woman in. Yes Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza when she come through diphtheria right enough the year before? Fairly blue with it she was.

They all thought she was dead. But my father, he kept ladling gin down her throat. Then she come to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon. Now, what would you call a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza, and what become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it, and what I say is, them that pinched it, done her in.

Them she lived with would have killed her for a hatpin, let alone a hat. And as for father ladling the gin down her throat, it wouldn’t have killed her. Not her. Gin was as mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’s poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.

Act III

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death. 

Act 3, Scene 1

You wouldn’t understand yet, son, but your daddy’s gonna make a transaction...a business transaction that’s going to change our lives...That’s how come one day when you ‘bout seventeen years old I’ll come home and I’ll be pretty tired, you know what I mean, after a day of conferences and secretaries getting things wrong the way they do...’cause an executive’s life is hell, man--And I’ll pull the car up on the driveway...just a plain black Chrysler, I think, with white walls--no--black tires.

More elegant. Rich people don’t have to be flashy...though I’ll have to get something a little sportier for Ruth--maybe a Cadillac convertible to do her shopping in...And I’ll come up the steps to the house and the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he’ll say, “Good evening, Mr. Younger.” And I’ll say, “Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?”

And I’ll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we’ll kiss each other and she’ll take my are and we’ll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you...All the great schools in the world! And--and I’ll say, all right son--it’s your seventeenth birthday, what is it you’ve decided?...just tell me where you want to go to school and you’ll go. Just tell me, what it is you want to be==Yessir! You just name it, son...and I hand you the world!

Act 2, Scene 2

(Monologue for young girls)

I never thought I could live without my beauty, but I guess I can.
But, I can't just go back to the way I was. I like my new life.
I just don't want to be who I was before. I can never be as good as Honor.

(To HONOR)

I'm still not as beautiful as you are, sister. I don't think I ever can be.

I used to think I was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom, but not anymore. Now I think you've always been the most beautiful the whole time, I just couldn't see it.

No, Fairy Godmother, don't change me back. I don't think I want my old beauty anymore. It does me more harm than good.

Part 14