The College and Drama-School Audition

A drama-school audition is not a screen audition, and treating it like one is a common way to stumble. The material is stage material, the pieces are usually longer, and the whole thing is built to test range under pressure. Here’s the convention — with the honest caveat that every program phrases it a little differently, so their wording always beats ours.

The two-contrasting-monologues convention

Most BFA and conservatory programs ask for two contrasting, fully memorized monologues, usually two minutes or less each, drawn from plays by established playwrights. Screen material and self-penned pieces are typically not allowed. “Contrasting” means genuinely different in style, period or energy — and the most common pairing is one classical and one contemporary.

“Contrasting” can also mean one comedic and one dramatic, or one big and physical against one contained and quiet. The underlying point is the same as Chapter V: the panel is buying range, and the pair has to show two different muscles. Two dramatic pieces that feel alike waste half your audition.

Time limits

Two minutes is the common ceiling, but many programs specify 90 seconds or even 60 per piece, and some cap the combined time across both. Over-running is penalized — it reads exactly the way it does in a screen audition (see Chapter III): you couldn’t read the room. Time both pieces at real performance pace, with buffer, and verify the limit for each school on your list rather than assuming they all match.

What programs actually want

Cut through the anxiety and the real ask is simple. Juilliard’s own guidance — which, remember from Chapter II, explicitly refuses to hand out a banned list — points to a character whose journey you’d want to live in for two minutes, on good writing, revealing you. Not obscurity for its own sake. Not a stretch role. Not a warhorse chosen to impress. Material at your current age and type.

That last line is a gift, because it takes the pressure off the hunt for something nobody’s ever heard. You don’t need the rarest speech in the canon. You need two pieces you can genuinely inhabit — one classical, one contemporary — that show two sides of you and fit who you are right now.

Building the pair legally and well

Here’s where our library is built for exactly this audition. The classical half you can assemble entirely for free — Shakespeare, the Greeks, Wilde, and pre-1929 Chekhov and Ibsen, all fully legal, all in the catalogue. The contemporary half is where copyright normally bites, which is why we also offer original modern-voiced pieces you can use. Read the classical-vs-contemporary chapter to get the distinction right before you choose.

Then build each piece properly: choose material you love, read the whole play, break it into beats and objectives, and take both through a real rehearsal process rather than a cram. Memorize them cold using Chapter VI, and check both against the active-vs-passive test in Chapter I. A drama-school panel can smell a passive, narrated piece from the back row.

The takeaway

Two contrasting pieces, usually classical plus contemporary, two minutes or less each, from established stage plays, memorized cold, chosen for your real age and type on good writing. Show two muscles, respect the time, and — above all — read each school’s exact wording, because the one thing every program shares is that they wrote down what they want and expect you to have read it.