The national August Wilson New Voices Competition is a collaboration between the August Wilson Estate, The Goodman Theatre, and Gilded Road Productions. The competition’s aim is to connect high school students to the deeply rich and affecting work of Black playwright August Wilson and to provide the opportunity for students to develop and hone their theatrical performance skills.

Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and TDF (formerly Theatre Development Fund) are thrilled to partner and produce the New York hub of August Wilson New Voices during the 2024-25 school year.

About August Wilson

August Wilson is the towering figure in African American dramatic literature and indeed one of the most important playwrights in American theatre history. His monumental Pittsburgh Cycle (or The American Century Cycle)—10 plays about the African-American experience, each set in a different decade of the 20th century—remains remarkable both for its ambition and for its achievement. Six of the 10 plays in the cycle won major awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony. Wilson claims to have been influenced by the “four B’s”—blues music, the artist Romare Bearden, the Argentine fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the African-American playwright Amiri Baraka. (He later added novelist James Baldwin and playwright Ed Bullins to the list.)

Wilson’s plays tend to be group portraits, rich depictions of the crosscurrents, tensions, and conflicts that affect and afflict the residents of Pittsburgh’s Hill District at varying moments during the 20th century. At the same time, vivid, idiosyncratic, memorable individual characters emerge from within these groups—the irrepressible Ma Rainey (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), the embittered, disappointed, but doggedly principled Troy Maxson (Fences), and the prophesying Stool Pigeon (King Hedley II), to name just a few.

Though grounded in realism, his plays can move towards the mystical (e.g., the self-playing piano in The Piano Lesson), the surreal (e.g., the ageless Aunt Ester who appears in several of his plays), and the lyrical. Wilson initially intended to be a poet, and his plays frequently contain long passages of heightened language. As noted, he was deeply influenced by the blues, and his characters’ speeches sometimes seem like musical numbers, employing vivid imagery and featuring repetitions of words and phrases.

His plays are far less overtly political than those of many of his African-American peers, including his acknowledged influencer Amiri Baraka. But they are all informed by the Black experience in White America. The white man is always just offstage, sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently pushing and pulling social and economic strings to the detriment of the Black community and the individuals it comprises.

Against that background, Wilson’s characters strive to achieve, to realize their individual dreams and ambitions, even while acknowledging and sustaining their powerful ties to their families, neighbors, and communities. They often lift their heads above the daily reality of earning a day’s pay to take the broad and long view. No matter how difficult their immediate situations, Wilson and his characters remain aware of the importance of spiritual and social legacies, the power of shared values and experiences, and the possibility of a better future.

(Photo by Craig Schwartz.)