The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Students stand and deliver in monologue contest
Regional August Wilson Competition Friday at Long Wharf
Since August Wilson’s career as a playwright was consummated in New Haven, it’s poetic justice that the regional monologue competition bearing his name takes place in the Elm City. The New Haven Regional Finals of the August Wilson Monologue Competition takes place on Friday at 7 p.m. at Long Wharf Theatre and is free and open to the public.
Long Wharf, in collaboration with Yale Repertory Theatre, Cooperative Arts & Humanities Magnet High School and other local area high schools, hosts the New Haven Regional August Wilson Monologue Competition. The program celebrates Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Wilson, who first emerged a playwright at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford in the early 1980s, then under the leadership of director Lloyd Richards.
Richards, then also the dean of Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Rep, staged the premieres of several of Wilson’s 10-Play Century Cycle chronicling the African-American experience over the course of the 20th century.
The national version of the competition, produced by Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre in collaboration with Jujamcyn Theatres, is an arts education program for high school students in grades 10-12. Two finalists in Friday’s regional competition will move on to the national competition in New York, where they will perform on a Broadway stage, see a Broadway play and have a chance to win college scholarships. The eight-week program is now in Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Dallas and Greensboro, N.C.
Treneé McGee, a resident teaching artist at Long Wharf, is, along with Madelyn Newman and Eliza Orleans, one of three lead teachers in this year’s program from Long Wharf ’s education department. The trio initially introduces them to Wilson’s plays before working directly with students on their monologues.
“We create curriculums based on August Wilson’s life, his biography and the competition itself,” said McGee, a West Haven native. “We travel around to schools that have invested time into our program. We help them pick out monologues, and we prepare them for the competition.”
According to McGee, the program drew 60 students to compete in the preliminary round.
“Then 15 from there go to the regional competition at Long Wharf,” she said. “The final three students earn awards, and first and second winners go to national competition. The third is an alternate.”
McGee, Newman (Long Wharf ’s director of education) and Orleans (the theater’s education programs director) work with the students on the physicality and emotional lives of their chosen characters, as well as memorization, voice production and scene study.
It would seem that teenage
actors may be hard-pressed to find age-appropriate monologues from Wilson’s plays, where most of the characters are seasoned adults. As McGee explained, the competition encourages students to eschew such limitations.
“What I love about the competition is that the rules are written as this,” said McGee, who, as a student at Cooperative Arts & Humanities Magnet High School, competed with Corey’s speech from “Fences.”
“If you are male and you relate to a female character, you can audition using her monologue,” said McGee, who graduated from Marymount College in New York with a BFA in theater. “If you are female and you relate to Corey, or another male character, you can use their monologues.
“What I also love is that by not setting boundaries by much ... the students sort of surprise us,” she said. “So we’ll have a student walk in, and they’re doing King Hedley. Or you have a really petite young woman coming in to portray one of the really, really, super-hyper masculine male characters. What’s great is that everyone’s interpretation is different.”
Some students, McGee said, know quickly what monologues to choose. Others rely more on the teachers for guidance.
“We have a few non-black students as well, and a young white woman came in, and she’s reading for Aunt Ester,” she said, referring to a mythical, 350year-old character present, both literally and spiritually, in “Gem of The Ocean” and other plays. “She did a phenomenal job. She understood the life of the character. She understood also that she probably (will) never be cast, but it didn’t affect her choice in picking her. So we kind of give them free reign unless they want our help.”
McGee said, even in the likely event that not all participating students wind up as professional actors, the experience boosts their self-confidence and builds their interpersonal communication skills.
“Cool thing about this is that there’s students performing monologues for the first time,” McGee said. “They’ve never read a play. Yet they get up (to perform), and they’re blown away by their abilities to act,” she said. “They’re blown away by their abilities to connect their emotions to a character’s word.”