Free scene cuttings.
Timed, marked, and cleared.
Your performers may perform this work in competition and in the classroom at no charge, with no royalty and no application. We put the permission in writing so no one has to chase us for it.
At a Glance
What a coach or director needs to know first.
- Cuttings
- Timed, 2:55 to 9:41
- Performers
- One to eight, doubling expected
- Royalty
- None, for competition or classroom
- Clearance
- Published in writing, no application
- Grade level
- 9 to 12
- Source
- Scriptbook edition, ISBN 9781732304734
- Setting
- Wichita, Kansas, 1968
The Cuttings
Every word is verbatim from the published scriptbook. Word counts are exact and count only words spoken aloud. Times are calculated at competition pace. Time it on your feet before you compete.
Newspaper Balls clean
A Black physician teaches a white boy to throw a shot put with a wadded-up newspaper. The boy asks how he can still sing after burying his son.
Show Me How You Hold It clean
City championship, final round. The white kid hands the Black kid the technique that will beat him, and means it. Ends on two boys clinking bottles of orange pop.
The Spillway language
A thirteen-year-old and a man with a pistol on a slab of concrete above a flooded river. The climax of the book. Extra text is provided so you can cut to your own pace.
My Goals for Seventh Grade clean
No racial content at all, and still the most emotionally direct piece here. A boy reads a letter he wrote to himself six months ago, back when he had a father and a brother.
Three Inches clean
A man who missed the 1952 Olympic team by three inches, talking to seventh graders. No props, no partner, no content advisory. Works as an audition monologue.
Kid Klansman clean
Most cross-racial scenes written for high schoolers resolve. This one refuses to. A role with teeth for a young actress.
The Curse of Ham clean
Two seventh graders give a partner report on race relations. One abandons the script and repeats out loud what his white partner actually believes. Then he pulls down his sock.
Sugar in the Gas Tank clean
A pregnant woman bleeds at two in the morning. The doctor's car will not start. Ivy tells it at a cafeteria table to three boys, and one of them poured the sugar. She does not know. The audience does.
Where This Material Is Eligible
The published scriptbook is a print publication with an ISBN, which is the simplest and safest source category in every rule set below.
| Organization | Eligible events | Closed |
|---|---|---|
| NSDA | DI, HI, Duo, POI | Prose, Poetry |
| KSHSAA | Serious & Humorous Solo Acting, Duet Acting, POI | — |
| NCFL | Dramatic Performance, Duo Interpretation | Oral Interp of Literature |
| NIETOC | DI, HI, Duo, POI | Prose, Poetry |
| EdTA Thespys | Solo, Duet, Group Acting | — |
| NFA (college) | Dramatic Interp, Duo, POI | — |
| AFA-NST (college) | Drama Interp, Dramatic Duo | Prose, Poetry |
Rules change. Verify against your organization's current manual before you enter. If you find something here that is out of date, write to us and we will fix it the same week.
The Clearance
Kansas rules put the burden on the performing school to verify clearance when a challenge is filed. Print this page, put it in the student's book, and the question is closed.
Grain Valley Publishing Company, LLC is the publisher and copyright holder of The Real Education of TJ Crowley: Coming of Age on the Redline. We grant blanket permission, at no charge, with no royalty owed and no application required, for the following:
- Competitive interpretation and acting events. Any student at an accredited public, private, parochial or home school may cut, adapt for transition, memorize and perform this work under NSDA, NCFL, NIETOC, EdTA, KSHSAA or any state association, NFA, AFA or Pi Kappa Delta rules.
- Classroom and rehearsal performance. Teachers may assign, read aloud, stage, block and perform scenes, including in a non-ticketed classroom showcase.
- Transcription of the audio drama. This serves as the copyright holder's written authorization to obtain or produce a transcript, satisfying NSDA's requirement that a transcript come from the producer, licensing agent or copyright holder.
- Language substitution. The work contains period-authentic racial slurs, spoken by characters the story condemns. We authorize and recommend the spoken substitution “[racial slur]” in every context. Using it does not void this permission.
Not covered: ticketed public performance of a full stage adaptation, broadcast or commercial recording, republication of the text, or use of the audio drama recording as the audio for a public performance. Write to us for any of those. We answer, and we usually say yes.
To verify: any tournament official, adjudicator, coach or administrator may confirm this clearance at grainvalleypress@gmail.com. We reply in writing, normally within one business day.
Get the Packets
The cuttings packet is for your students. The teacher packet is for the conversation with your principal.
Educator packet
All cuttings with trim notes, the printable clearance letter, historical sourcing on 1968 Wichita, a parent letter template, Kansas ELA alignment, and the language substitution protocol.
Or just email us. Write to grainvalleypress@gmail.com with your name and school and we will send it.
We do not sell or share your address, and one click unsubscribes.
About the Work
Wichita, Kansas, July 1968. A citywide curfew is in force. Thirteen-year-old TJ Crowley keeps watch at the picture window while his mother drinks in the kitchen. In the morning the doorbell rings, and the Black physician moving in next door introduces himself, and she slams the door on him.
What follows is a year in which the boy is recruited into that hatred, participates in it, and unlearns it. At the end, the man his mother rejected saves her life.
“Performed by a gifted cast, this slice of our history stays with the listener.”
The scriptbook edition carries the complete text of all 79 scenes, so your performers can follow the printed line while the recorded performance runs. They read what is on the page, hear what a working professional did with it, and then decide what they are going to do differently.
The Company
Fifteen actors. Twenty-four roles. Directed by May Wuthrich.
| Role | Performed by | Credentials |
|---|---|---|
| TJ Crowley | Dani Martineck | 2025 Audie Award winner. New York stage actor, screenwriter, and filmmaker. |
| Dr. Robert Washington Leon Bowman | Dion Graham | AudioFile Golden Voice. Multiple Audie Award winner. Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. On screen in HBO’s The Wire. Co-producer of this production. |
| Kate Crowley | Tavia Gilbert | Audie Award for Best Female Narrator. Founder of Talkbox Productions. Co-producer of this production. |
| Ivy Washington | Shayna Small | Trained at The Juilliard School. Four Audie Awards. Stage work at The Public Theater, Geffen Playhouse, and Huntington Theatre Company. |
| Andy Campfield | Kevin R. Free | AudioFile Golden Voice. More than 450 audiobooks. Artistic Director of Mile Square Theatre. Award-winning playwright. |
| Raymond “Uncle Ray” Hatcher KBI Agent Brownlee | Johnny Heller | AudioFile Golden Voice. Audie Award winner. Teaches audiobook narration for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Voiceover Lab. |
| Detective Harris | Ari Fliakos | Obie Award for performance. Longtime member of The Wooster Group. New York Theatre Workshop. |
| Ronnie Crowley Mr. Maplewood, Mr. Peachin | Michael Crouch | AudioFile Golden Voice. Audie Award winner for Salt to the Sea. BFA in Musical Theatre, Ithaca College. |
| Eric Armstrong | Kirby Heyborne | Odyssey Award winner. Audie Award winner. More than 300 titles narrated. |
| Mr. Johnson Coach Gordon | Graham Halstead | AudioFile Earphones Award winner. Stage work in New York, Washington, Edinburgh, and London. |
| Mrs. Lorraine Washington Miss Maybelle | Sheila Brown Kinnard | Wichita voice on a Wichita story, performing a character drawn from the life of her own mother, Josephine Brown. |
| Mrs. Armstrong Widow Bender, Miss Roberts | Thérèse Plummer | Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. More than 700 audiobooks. On screen in Law & Order: SVU and Virgin River. |
| Mrs. Herndon Mrs. Peters | Brittany Pressley | AudioFile Earphones Award winner. Columbia University. Singer and songwriter. |
| Vice Principal Scott | Peter Berkrot | Four decades on stage and screen, including Caddyshack. Founder of an acting studio and a teacher of narration. |
| Local broadcasts | John Wright | The radio and television voice of Wichita, 1968. |
Every actor listed above is a credited winner of the 2025 Audie Award for Best Young Adult Audiobook for this production.
The Author and Executive Producer
Grant Overstake wrote the novel, co-authored the adaptation and the scriptbook edition with May Wuthrich, and served as executive producer.
He lived on the redline, at 25th Street North and Hillside. That was the line. On one side, 67214, the redlined ZIP. On the other, 67220. It is the corner the story is set on, and 1968 was the year it broke. He went to Buckner Elementary and then to Brooks Junior High, which are the same two schools TJ goes to in the book. The story is based on actual events and its characters are inspired by real people, including his own family.
He sings in the ARISE Ensemble, whose music is in the drama. The choir was founded by Josephine Brown, whose family inspired the novel. Her daughter, Sheila Brown Kinnard, is in the cast, performing a character drawn from her own mother.
He began in newspapers at eighteen at The Wichita Eagle, studied at the University of Kansas School of Journalism, where he won the national William Randolph Hearst Award, and joined The Miami Herald at twenty-four. He founded Grain Valley Publishing and works as a teaching artist for Arts Partners Wichita, where he has presented workshops and assemblies to thousands of students. His first novel, Maggie Vaults Over the Moon, was named a National Book of the Week by Publishers Weekly. The Real Education of TJ Crowley was named Book of the Year by the Kansas Authors Club and is used as a core text in history classes at Wichita State University.
This matters to a competitor. A judge asks a performer why they chose the piece. A student performing this one can say the author lived on that street, went to that school, watched it happen, and will answer their question by email.
The Director
May Wuthrich is the co-author, adapter, producer, and director of this production. She has more than 400 audiobooks to her credit and directs for Penguin Random House Audio, HarperAudio, Blackstone, Listening Library, and Live Oak Media. She began as a stage actor in New York and worked in film development for Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Productions and for Alan J. Pakula before moving into audio. Her credits include the full-cast recording of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls, winner of the 2020 Audie Award for Fiction. She and the author spent four years building this adaptation.
How It Got Made
Grain Valley Publishing is one person in Wichita, Kansas. The 2025 Audie Awards are decided by the Audio Publishers Association, and the field is the audiobook industry, a business of roughly $2.2 billion dominated by the largest publishing houses in the world. A one-person press from Kansas assembled this company, recorded it at John Marshall Media in New York with additional sessions at Wichita State University’s Shocker Studios, and won the category.
Sound design AudioFile called “moments of remarkable verisimilitude.” Starred review from Kirkus. Recommended for mature teen and adult readers, grades 9 to 12.
AudioFile Earphones Award
IPPY Gold Medal, Outstanding Audiobook of the Year
grainvalleypress@gmail.com