TDF Stages

TDF and Manhattan Theatre Club are partnering on the regional August Wilson New Voices competition in NYC. Here's how high schoolers can participate and vie for prizes

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For Christian Helem, participating in the August Wilson Monologue Competition changed the trajectory of his life. "I was a junior at The Chicago High School for the Arts and I competed with the Memphis monologue from Two Trains Running," he recalls. "It was my introduction to August Wilson's work and that became the monologue I used for college auditions. On top of that, because I won the competition in Chicago, I received a partial scholarship to the School of Theatre and Music at University of Illinois, Chicago." Helem was so inspired by the August Wilson Monologue Competition, he returned as a staffer, eventually serving as the Competition Director of the Chicago hub from 2015 to 2023.

The winner of a multitude of honors, including one Tony Award and two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson is celebrated for his American Century Cycle: ten plays, each set in a different decade, depicting the African-American experience throughout the 20th century. Although he died in 2005, Wilson's work continues to resonate. This season, multiple theatres in Baltimore are collaborating to mount all ten plays in chronological order, and Denzel Washington is in the process of producing (and sometimes starring) in the entire cycle on screen.

Helem believes all students will be enriched by the power and poetry of August Wilson's words, even if they aren't actors. The competition, which was renamed August Wilson New Voices in 2021, is an excellent way to expose high schoolers to his oeuvre. "When people think of classic plays, they think of Shakespeare and Molière, but they should also be thinking of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson," Helem says. "It's really important that students read a wide variety of writers and also that Black students see themselves represented on stage."

For the 2025 edition of August Wilson New Voices, TDF is partnering with Manhattan Theatre Club for the regional competition in New York City. All local high school students ages 19 or younger are eligible to participate. This program is free—there is no cost to compete. Preliminary Auditions are scheduled for Saturday, February 1, 2025. There are two ways to participate:

• Attend an August Wilson Day of Learning on either Saturday, December 7, 2024 or Sunday, December 15, 2024 to gain new performance skills and learn about August Wilson’s life and work; an optional one-on-one monologue coaching session on January 11, 2025 is also available. (Registration deadline is November 14, 2024.)
  
  
• Select an approved monologue and prepare independently for the Preliminary Auditions. (Registration deadline is December 13, 2024.)

You can learn more about August Wilson New Voices by attending an open house in person on Saturday, November 9 or via Zoom on Monday, November 11. The top three finalists will receive cash prizes, and two winners will go on to compete at nationals in Wilson's hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 26 to 29, 2025, all expenses paid. Click here to register for these events.

Derrick Sanders is the National Director of August Wilson New Voices. He’s been involved almost since its 2007 inception, when Kenny Leon and Todd Kreidler founded the competition. At that time, Sanders was assisting Leon on directing Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf, on Broadway, and he recalls being extremely excited about the idea. After the inaugural edition in Atlanta, Georgia, Leon and Kreidler asked Sanders to launch the regional Chicago competition.

"I got into it because it was a way to pay tribute to August every year and all the things that he did for me," explains Sanders, who also serves as the Associate Director of the Drama Division at Juilliard. "When I was an undergrad at Howard University, I was inspired by Wilson's The Ground on Which I Stand," the playwright's 1996 speech calling for African-American artists to take control of their cultural identity in the theatre industry. "I was going to school to be an actor, and then I read that and thought, you know what? This is the charge. This is the thing that I really want to do, to be a part of exposing the work of African Americans in the diaspora on a national platform."

As Sanders embarked on his journey, he connected with Wilson and became involved in the development of his last two plays: Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf. "I got a chance to see how he worked," Sanders says. "It was a fundamental grounding for me as an artist."

Sanders believes today’s high schoolers will be as galvanized by Wilson’s work as he was in his youth. One of the main goals of the competition is for "August to be taught in every school in the nation," Sanders says. "How do we get August to be part of the high school curriculum, not just in English, not just in drama, but in social studies and civics, too?"

He's particularly excited to be bringing the competition back to NYC for the first time since 2019. "New York has such a strong legacy of doing August’s plays on Broadway," he says. “There's even a Broadway theatre named after him, and yet some students don't know who he is. It was always important to me to come back to New York, but the right partnership was key. When I came to TDF, it seemed our missions aligned, and Manhattan Theatre Club has done some amazing productions of August’s work. This is the right collaboration so that all the kids in every borough have access to August Wilson's work and an opportunity to win some scholarship money."

When Sanders says all NYC high schoolers, he means it. "We want everybody to be a part of it: all races, all creeds, all genders," he affirms. "It doesn't matter if you're not African American. One of the most powerful performances we’ve had was a Latina student who was Deaf. It’s truly open to all high school students."

While some previous competitors have gone on to acting glory—past finalists include Dear Evan Hansen's Kristolyn Lloyd, Hamilton's Jasmine Cephas Jones and two-time Tony nominee Jeremy Pope—Sanders says it's not about winning or even performing.

"I'm proud of the ones who work on TV and on Broadway, but I'm just as proud of the students who find their voice," he says. "I had this one student who, early on in Chicago, he didn't even have an ID so he couldn't travel on a plane to the finals. He ultimately got into real estate and came back to talk to the students at an alumni event. He spoke so beautifully about how he found his voice and how he found his own power through August Wilson. If these students can say August Wilson's words in front of hundreds of people, then they can do anything."