091: Freshman Monologue Text

Hello all --

Here is the monologue that you will need to prepare for your 091 juries.

It is a monologue from the short play Variations on the Death of Trotsky by David Ives. (You can access a pdf of the play at this link. It is very short.)

Please film yourself performing this piece and upload it to this padlet page.

Trotsky:

So even an assassin can make the flowers grow. The gardener was false, and yet the garden that he tended was real. How was I to know he was my killer when I passed him every day? How was I to know that the man tending the nasturtiums would keep me from seeing what the weather will be like tomorrow? How was I to know I'd never see Casablanca, which wouldn't be made until 1942 and which I would have despised anyway? How was I to know I'd never get to know about the bomb, or the eighty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Or rock and roll, or Gorbachev, or the state of Israel? How was I supposed to know I'd be erased from the history books of my own land..?

Sometime, for everyone, there's a room that you go into, and it's the room that you never leave. Or else you go out of a room and it's the last room that you'll ever leave. This is my last room.