Dani Martineck is thirteen years old for nine hours
Publisher’s note: this is one of fifteen short pieces introducing the actors of The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline. Fifteen actors, twenty-four roles, nine hours of audio. One actor at a time, with a clip to hear.
MEET THE CAST · No. 2 of 15
Every hour of this drama is carried by a thirteen-year-old, and the actor voicing him had to hold that for all nine.
TJ Crowley is the scriptbook’s “troubled hero.” His father has vanished, his brother has shipped out to Vietnam, his mother is frightened and bigoted, and a Black family has moved in next door. The story is told from inside his head. If that voice is wrong, nothing else in the production matters.
Dani Martineck has won an ALA Odyssey Honor for their first audiobook, We’re Not From Here by Geoff Rodkey, and multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards since. On screen, they have appeared in CBS’s Blue Bloods and HBO’s Succession. They came to acting by way of experimental psychology, a useful background for a part that is mostly interior.
The sample below comes from Scene 1, the first time you meet him. Worth keeping in your ear, because by the city championship in Act Three the boy speaking has changed his worldview.
TJ is invented. The 1968 Wichita he grows up in is not.
More on Dani Martineck: danimartineck.com
Follow along in the scriptbook
Adapted from Grant Overstake’s novel, winner of the Kansas Authors Club book award. The scriptbook prints the word-for-word performance script, exactly as the cast performs it. Bonus material, discussion questions, and educator guides included.
Get the scriptbookThe audio drama has won
- 2025 Audie Award, Young Adult
- IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year, Audiobook
- AudioFile Earphones Award
About this project
This series is published by Grain Valley Publishing Company, LLC, in support of The Real Education Project, the nonprofit arts and education effort that carries the drama into classrooms and public listening events.
A note on how this happened. At the 2025 Audie Awards, the Young Adult category came down to five finalists. Four were the audio divisions of some of the largest publishers in the world: Macmillan Audio, Simon & Schuster Audio, Penguin Random House Audio, and HarperAudio. The fifth was a publishing company in Wichita, Kansas, working with Blackstone Publishing. That one won.
Made possible by the fiscal sponsorship of the Youth Educational Empowerment Program and in part by the Kansas Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Fifteen actors voice twenty-four roles across 9:07:47 of audio. Directed and produced by May Wuthrich. Executive producer Grant Overstake. Recorded at John Marshall Media, New York City, and distributed by Blackstone Publishing.
The scriptbook these actors perform from is also free to perform yourself. The Redline Scenes releases scene cuttings from The Real Education of TJ Crowley for speech and forensics competition and classroom use, free to perform and cleared to compete, at no charge and with no separate contract.
