Justin Waggle, 27

Occupation: Actor, stage manager, web programmer

Hometown: Oceano, Calif.

Zodiac sign: Capricorn

Web presence: www.monologuesearch.com, www.theatrevolution.com

Justin Waggle lives in Oceano now, but come October he'll be in New York City. After that, who knows. Maybe the Central Coast again, maybe not. "I always knew I was going to be a vagabond," says Waggle, who works for the Great American Melodrama in Oceano. "And that's really how everyone here is. We're just here until the next thing comes along, and then the next thing."

Unlike all the other arts, theater requires your physical presence. A painter can live in the Bermudas and hang his or her art on the walls of a Paris gallery. Even film actors can fly in for a movie shoot in Hollywood and fly back to their ranch retreat in Montana when the shoot is over.

Not so for theater actors. The stage doesn't work without human bodies.

When you're young and ambitious, that means you move around a lot, always in search of the next gig. That can be hard for people who've staked their career on the idea of "human connection." Sometimes the only place the theater community actually can connect is on the Internet. Maybe that's why every actor has a MySpace webpage these days.

"It's cool to just be able to reach out and say, 'Hey, how's it going,'" explains Waggle.

But Waggle isn't content with using the Internet simply as a way to keep in touch. Right now, Waggle is the stage manager for Davy Crockett at the Melodrama. He also started his own theater company, Theatrevolution, last spring. And in his free time, he manages his cyber-brainchild, www.monologuesearch.com.

Waggle launched the site last year as an altruistic gesture toward all the amateur and veteran actors out there trying to land that dream role.

Actors are expected to perform monologues, long speeches pulled from plays, when they audition for most plays or for theater conservatories. But wading through plays and monologue collections at the library can be a daunting, tedious process. And sometimes the selection of plays can be limited.

"It's just frustrating. You go to Borders, you go to Barnes and Nobles, and they have the same five plays, the same five monologue books," Waggle says.

Monologuesearch.com operates according to the rules of reciprocity. In order to access the site's database of monologues, a new user must contribute his or her own 50-word snippet of a monologue. Because these are just portions of monologues, Waggle avoids copyright restrictions. Actors must seek out the complete monologue at a bookstore or library.

In just a year, the actor-turned-website developer has accrued a collection of 1,355 monologues, searchable by genre, playwright, and the age and gender of the character.

And just last week, Waggle added a new feature to the site: "plays on tap," which allows playwrights to self-publish new work as a kind of "e-play." When theater directors and actors purchase a $5 play off the site, most of the money ($3) lands in the author's pocket, though a portion goes to Waggle, who updates the website with the help of his girlfriend, fellow actor Virginia Wilcox.

"Basically we want to promote their work. The $1.28 we get from the sale will hopefully be able to pay to make the site better," Waggle explains. "This is not about making money for us."

The first play was contributed by Rick Robinson, who lives in Santa Maria but writes plays produced in Los Angeles. His most recent show, Multiverse, is onstage right now with the theater company Lucid by Proxy. Ironically (or not), the play's protagonist is a computer programmer.

The play he's published on Monologuesearch.com, School of Jesus Fish, challenges our notions of mental illness and spirituality through the story of the ward of a psychiatric hospital who claims to be God's daughter. A Monologuesearch.com user can read the play by purchasing it, but must contact Robinson if he or she wants to perform it.

Actors typically deal in the realm of emotion and personal relationships, in the kind of raw

human experience that seems like the farthest thing from a computer screen. But Waggle says that these days it's not enough to be a one-trick kind of wonder you have to know how to do it all to succeed in theater.

"I feel like part of our journey in acting is that we do everything, if you're really going to stay in it. Because that way we become more of a community," Waggle says.