The shutdown of live theater has meant a boom in short, sharp Zoom monologues. But the form goes way back, before social isolation, and some of the most celebrated examples are full-length shows. (One of them, “Fleabag,” went on to be adapted into an award-winning multicharacter television series.)
Here’s a guide to 10 you can watch right now, or very soon. They include work from eminent dramatists (Beckett and Bennett) as well as brand-new voices responding to the many tumults of 2020.
‘Zoom Intervention’
Classic monologues — think “Hamlet” — illuminate the process of thinking. The best Zoom monologues work differently; they show people trying, despite distance, to connect. In “Zoom Intervention,” a Weston Playhouse commission by Noelle Viñas, a mother (Liza Colón-Zayas) calls her family together to confront her drug-addict son, whom she can no longer allow into her home. In less than 10 minutes, we learn not only how she thinks but also how, with great love and pain, she turns her thoughts into actions. JESSE GREEN
Watch on YouTube.
‘Fleabag’
The title character of this supremely witty, supremely sad work of corkscrew portraiture — written and performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge — takes a kamikaze approach to relationships with friends, family, lovers, strangers and guinea pigs. The basis for the Emmy-winning TV series, this one-hour study in self-destruction is as concentrated and intoxicating as a triple shot of tequila. BEN BRANTLEY
Watch in movie theaters this fall courtesy of NT Live.
‘A Chip in the Sugar’
The playwright and actor Alan Bennett brings a peerless combination of shyness and slyness to the role of Graham, a middle-aged boy whose best (and only) friend is his mother. This quietly spoken monologue, from the 1988 incarnation of Bennett’s “Talking Heads” series for BBC Television, slowly reveals the disruptive perversity within an order-loving, cardigan-wearing homebody who has just a touch of Norman Bates in his stolidity. BEN BRANTLEY
Watch on YouTube.
‘Thank You For Coming. Take Care.’
What’s your role when someone performs a monologue? I find the form most compelling when you are not just an observer but a specific character being spoken to. In Stacey Rose’s “Thank You for Coming. Take Care,” that means you are a foster parent in a prison visiting room listening to a mother (Patrice Bell) explain why she’s agreed to let you adopt her child. It would break your heart in any format, but in this presentation it does more: It implicates you. JESSE GREEN
Watch at Theater for One, Thursdays through Oct. 29.
‘Sea Wall’
Plenty of Zoom monologues feel less like theater than this intimate 2011 film of Simon Stephens’s one-act, whose star, Andrew Scott, has since become known as the sexy priest on “Fleabag.” Here he is Alex, a young husband and father with an endearingly gentle charm and a need to address something that people pretend, politely, not to see: the hole that opened up in him when his sun-dappled life was disfigured by tragedy. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Watch on Vimeo.
‘Latin History for Morons’
A motor mouth of unusually high horsepower and a gifted physical comedian, the Colombian-American actor John Leguizamo has made manic, profane solo work for 30 years and counting. YouTube has his audacious early shows; in 2018, Netflix recorded a Broadway performance of “Latin History for Morons,” a frantic attempt to cram 3,000 years of Latinx experience into 90 delirious minutes. “We’re so American it hurts,” Leguizamo says as the comedy spirals into something angrier and sadder. ALEXIS SOLOSKI
Watch on Netflix.
‘Not I’
An entire lifetime, in all its rushing and monotonous variety, is telescoped into a breathless 15 minutes in Samuel Beckett’s primal cry of a monologue, delivered by a disembodied mouth. In this 1973 rendering, the mouth belongs to Billie Whitelaw, perhaps the greatest of Beckett interpreters, who worked closely with the playwright. You’ll appreciate why Whitelaw likened performing the piece to seeing “my entrails under a microscope.” BEN BRANTLEY
Watch on YouTube.
‘Jack Was Kind’
If the title “The Good Wife” weren’t taken, Tracy Thorne could have used it for this sneaky new monologue, in which she plays a well-heeled white woman whose soothing voice is perfect for placating. This is a play about complicity — about wives who tend to their husbands’ honor even when they are violent, or otherwise dangerous. But it’s also about the social conditioning that taught those women, when they were girls, to put the menfolk first. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Watch at All for One Theater through Oct. 10.
‘L.A. Yoga _____________’
Stephen Adly Guirgis is not known for writing short, but this four-minute burst of genius — a play whose title echoes the colorful obscenity in the name of his one Broadway show — distills his particular brand of furious, foul-mouthed, frustrated decency right down to its vivid comic essence. Performed by Andre Royo as a stressed-out man booted from yoga class, this may be the most hilariously angry paean to civility you’ll ever see. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Watch on YouTube.
‘Nanette’
The comedian Hannah Gadsby does not love it when people call her autobiographical breakthrough show a monologue. Classify it however you like; it is a shockingly powerful work of art, as funny as it is flaying. An assertion of self as gay and female, this is a rigorously intelligent rebuke to a society that counts either of those categories as lesser than. Amid poisonous public discourse, Gadsby offers this piece as part of the antidote: “Stories,” she says, “hold our cure.” LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES
Watch on Netflix.
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