New 5-minute dramatic monologue for female actor: The Adventure of the Seed
Imagine graduating from High School, marrying your sweetheart, relishing one week together as husband and wife, then seeing your love off to fight a war in another country—and then finding out you’re pregnant with his child! Your husband may, or may not, return. You’re a newlywed, young, excited, elated—but also nervous, worried, frightened, alone. My new dramatic piece takes us back to 1940s WWII, as this scenario unfolds in Alice’s monologue, The Adventure of the Seed. This monologue stands alone as its own piece, but it also comes from the collection of shorts in the full-length play, The The Victory Garden Plays. Forever grateful to Megan Benjamin who originated this role beautifully in the Winter 2019 production. It runs approximately 4-5 minutes, for a female actor, late teen to early adult.
Enjoy the excerpt below or read the entire monologue here.
ALICE
I’m mailing this seed today, and it will go on a greater adventure than I have ever been on. It’ll start right here, in New Rochelle. A seed I’ve taken from a watermelon I’ve grown in our backyard victory garden and dried over two weeks. It’s sealed in an envelope and it’ll be picked up tomorrow morning by Mr. Parker, our mailman. It will ride in a US Postal truck to New York City, then it will find a good long rest on a boat, or maybe a plane, which will cross the Atlantic Ocean to France. From there, it will bump along in a military vehicle, until it reaches its final destination and infantry division, and into the warm, fair hands of Mr. Richard Ayers.
(pause)
Richard is most likely in the trenches, because he’s 19, and in the army. The trenches often fill with mud, and it’s hard to sleep because he hears the bombs in the distance and he wonders if the sounds are getting closer or he is just imagining it. It’s getting harder to tell what is really happening anymore, because none of it seems real when he thinks about it.
(pause)
A year ago, when we fell in love, he was in High School, hoping to become a university professor one day. He liked English literature courses and playing the clarinet, and he had never killed anyone, or thought of killing anyone before. Then they bombed Pearl Harbor, and this caused him to be filled with a new kind of hatred he had only read about, and it made him put his books down and begin his own, real, journey that maybe he will write about one day.
(pause)
He’s happy when the mail comes. Mail is second only to food and munition, the government says, and he says that’s true. Sometimes, troops get a magazine with a photograph of Rita Hayworth and the men pass it around. My Richard shakes his head at the photograph of Rita Hayworth because it doesn’t seem like she can possibly be in the same world as them anymore, but he likes looking at her nonetheless. END OF EXCERPT
Click below for the complete 4-5 minute dramatic monologue, The Adventure of the Seed.