Mouthful Philadelphia Young Playwrights

For Season Three of Mouthful, we'll be talking to ten student playwrights who are bringing their monologues to life for the 2019 Mouthful Monologue Festival.

In this episode, we meet the 18 winning writers whose monologues will premiere for public audiences in just a few days.

RESERVE YOUR TICKETS! If you're in the Philly area, you can catch all 18 monologues at a performance February 28-March 9 at the Louis Bluver Theater at the Drake. All performances are Pay What You Decide.

Music: "Wavy Glass" and "Blossoming" by Podington Bear is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

Season Three is here, and we're kicking things off with two behind-the-scenes episodes. In this episode, we take a peek behind the curtain to learn what goes in to selecting the winning monologues. From 661 to 18–it's quite a task.

A monologue written from the perspective of Philadelphia, imploring its citizens to put down the guns, starts a conversation about gun violence. Featuring conversations with Tyler Riddick, a senior at the U School who wrote the monologue after her friend was killed by a stray bullet; Jose Ferran, a peer intervention specialist at Healing Hurt People who survived a gunshot to the arm in 2011; Leonard Chester, founder of The Overcame Foundation; and Jerrick Medrano, who performs the monologue and opens up about his own experiences with gun violence.

A monologue about a young man who is turned away from his first job interview starts a conversation about how we treat individuals on the autism spectrum and how we prepare them for work and independence. Featuring conversations with Dylan Henry, a sophomore at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, whose younger brother inspired the monologue; and three individuals from Project SEARCH, a program that offers vocational training and internships to young adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

A monologue about a young woman grappling with her identity after a friend is attacked starts a conversation about being Muslim in America. Featuring conversations with the writer Ruya Erkut, a freshman at George Washington Carver, and her mother, Ebru Erkut, who works as a paralegal at an immigration firm. This is a personal episode about growing up and parenting as a Muslim in the current, fraught political climate. 

A monologue about a young man sharing some news with his mother starts a conversation about coming out. Featuring conversations with Lisbet Espinal, a sophomore at the Philadelphia Military Academy, who wrote “Breaking Barriers” to address a problem she perceives in her community, and with Francisco Cortes, Interim Executive Director or GALAEI, a queer Latinx social justice organization.