Life Expectancies: Monologues That Challenge

By Michael Kearns

The average life expectancy is about 75 years. But there's another kind of life expectancy, one that describes how we each feel our life ought to go, ought to be lived. When conflict, obstacles, and tragedies shake our lives, these life expectancies are challenged, stretched to their limitsand sometimes they break. For Michael Kearns this friction between expectation and the unexpected is a wellspring for vivid, authentic drama about everyday and extraordinary people.

In Life Expectancies Kearns grapples with the difficult feelings that result when our expectations don't match our reality, and the resulting monologues challenge the audience and the performer to humanize topics and people who are often willfully ignored. Whether entering the shadow world of the homeless through a street person's thoughts, going far afield to see war's devastation through eyes that have experienced Iraq up close, or clinging to home in order to unknot a father-child relationship, the humor, humanity, and emotional honesty in Kearns' collection of outcasts and misfits prove they are not society's losers, but rather its graceful, artful survivors.

Confront the expectations of yourself, your audience, or a casting director. Read Life Expectancies, perform its gritty, vibrant monologues, and come to understand people whose lives have been changedfor the worse and for the betterby the unexpected.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0325008310
• ISBN13: 9780325008318
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Heinemann Drama
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.4" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher