Students from Hillcrest High School breathed new life into the words of August Wilson.

Fourteen students competed in the preliminary round of non-profit educational service organization Learning through an Expanded Art Program (LeAp)’s Inaugural August Wilson Monologue Competition at Hillcrest High School. Four students –Jillian Quinn, Cory Ferguson, Erica Washington, and Paul Edme Belneau—won and will go onto the 1st Annual NYC August Wilson Monologue Competition on April 6, 2009. The winners from the NYC competition will go on to the 1st Annual National August Wilson Monologue Competition to compete against the winners from Atlanta and Pittsburgh for scholarships and cash prizes. As part of the program, students will also attend a performance of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone produced by Lincoln Center on Broadway.

The students performed works from August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays including Vera, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Ma Rainey, Becker, Jitney, and more.

“We decided that a way to keep August Wilson alive as a theater artist is to bring these plays to young folks and have them compete, work on diction, confidence, and perseverance,” said Kenny Leon, one of August Wilson’s closest living collaborators and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of True Colors Theatre Company in Atlanta, who spoke to the students at Hillcrest High School.

Giving the students advice about acting, Leon said, “80 percent of a successful actor’s life is rejection. You need to believe in yourself 100 percent, don't count on anyone else’s 2 percent. [August Wilson] said 'Your belief in yourself has to be double than everybody's collective disbelief.’”

August Wilson’s works are a singular achievement in the American Theater. At the plays’ core are the soaring, lyrical monologues that take the song, laughter, pain, and rich content of African American life and place it in the mouths of the greatest and varied ensemble of characters written since Shakespeare.