Giving Voice movie review & film summary (2020)

After August Wilson died in 2005, his friends and former colleagues established a student competition in his memory, inviting young actors to inhabit his characters and speak their words by presenting monologues. It began at just one school, then expanded nationwide. The documentary "Giving Voice" follows the 2018 competitors as they talk about discovering their love for theatrical performance and work with coaches and teachers. And then we follow the finalists from across the country as they visit New York City for the finals, attending their first Broadway show, Once on This Island. They meet with a cast member, 19-year-old Hailey Kilgore, who was in the August Wilson Monologue Competition twice. 

The film also includes interviews with some of Wilson's collaborators, including Viola Davis, who won both a Tony and an Oscar for her performances in Wilson's "Fences," and stars in the current Netflix film "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." She and her husband, Julius Tennon, are executive producers of the documentary. She says Wilson was "that one writer who saw me. I mean me but also people like me. For me he's a muse."

That feeling is echoed by the young actors who are thrilled to discover themselves, their families, and their communities in Wilson's work, within the rich characterization and wide variety of experiences his plays encompass. Freedom Martin says, "I always felt my experience as a Black man was different than other Black men's experiences. August Wilson was saying these are Black people regardless of what they went through. Which was life-changing. For the first time I felt comfortable in my own skin." Callie Holley talks about her feeling of recognition when she read Wilson's words: "I felt like that speech was already in me."

It is moving to see the commitment high school students bring to their monologues. Despite all they say about how much Wilson's words mean to them, they are playing characters from another era, long before they were born, characters who have experienced what their families have lived through and perhaps not talked about. It is even more moving to see the young performers grow in confidence as their range of opportunities and sense of responsibility expands. Wilson's widow, costume designer Constanza Romero, speaks of the competition as passing the baton. The next generation will keep the stories Wilson wrote alive.

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