Book excerpt: First published in 1994. The Modern Monologue is a continuation of the previous collection The Classical Monologue. This starts at the dawn of the modern age in 1892, presenting a survey of indispensable speeches from plays that continue to shape the course of modern theatre. The plays included in this collection also happen to be the ones that have helped to define modern acting in all its many guises. Modern playwrights such as Brecht, Genet, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Shepard, Guare, Nichols and Churchill, to name only a handful of the dramatists represented here, assume that a play and its characters are malleable and shifting; that mood swings, strangeness and sudden eruptions are key components of modern theatre's compelling attraction.