Monologue Feedback

So, I presented my monologue to the advanced playwriting course, and the feedback, while generally positive, pointed to a lot of issues with the piece. I'll recap:

1. Most people were either not with the story about Grandpa, or were lost when the monologue transitioned into the story of the character's friend. This is perhaps the easiest to remedy as a matter of practice, but the hardest for me to actually commit to. Obviously, the monologue has to be about the character's friend, and obviously the bulk of his storytelling is about his grandfather, so obviously I need to trim the story about the grandfather. I may have to work this story in later in the play, or maybe just cut it completely, and leave it as a little piece of information I know (and you guys know) that informs in some small way the protagonist's character. It's still painful to cut any of it, though.

2. People want to learn more about the protagonist's friend. This will easily be solved by, well, the entire rest of the play, but I think I can give the audience a little more about her here in the monologue as well.

3. There needs to be dramatic action. This is something the professor insists on that most students tend to roll their eyes about but for the most part I agree. As I wrote the monologue I wrote as if it were an internal monologue at the beginning of a novel, and that kind of narration works wonderfully in a novel. But I believe that audiences want to see something happening. They want to watch rather than be told. And there is dramatic action in the piece, it just comes at the tail end after several minutes of talking about his grandfather. So the action of the monologue needs to come earlier, but that shouldn't be too difficult if I refocus the story to be about his friend rather than Grandpa.

4. Maintain the disjointedness. This was actually positive feedback for the section about his friend, but was also reverse engineered into constructive criticism for the section about his grandfather. The feedback, and I'll paraphrase because it was probably the most poignant and helpful feedback I got from the class, was that when the character's thinking became more disjointed when talking about his friend: "that was when it felt like he was talking to me, rather than at me." I was worried that I'd lose people when his thinking would bounce back and forth between death, jokes and the three wishes game, but the class pretty much universally agreed that was when they felt most connected to him.

5. Maintain the contrasts. The contrasts between death, grief and humor resonated well with the class, and is something I plan on making a major theme throughout the play. The second contrast in this piece, and something that didn't work as well as I had hoped, was in his reactions between his grandpa's death and his friend's death. We need to know how he reacted to his grandpa's death and we need to know it in this scene, that much I am sure of. We also need to see some more hints about why this death is affecting him so much harder, and it has to be more than just age. That's some work I need to put into it.

My plan is to revise this monologue sometime before the end of the week, and then move on the rest of the act. What do you guys think about this feedback?