The Shakespeare monologue competitions are an integral part of the English program at the Albany Academies. The assignment requires each high school student to memorize 15 – 20 lines of a monologue from any Shakespeare play. The student must then perform the monologue for his or her English class, and is graded on memorization, expression, eye contact, and other key performance techniques. Several students from each grade are selected to move on to the grade-wide “run-offs.” The top performing girl and boy from each grade are selected to move on to the final, school-wide round of the competition, which this year took place on February 14th.


Rachel Ruller (’11), Nour Sultan (’11), Frances Yanover (’12), Grayson Ullman (’12), Teagan Ketchum (’13), Michael Drucker (’13), Allie Aiello (’14) and Jelani Hoyte-King (’14) all advanced to this last round, in which they performed their monologue for the entire upper school as well as for several faculty judges who graded their performance. Though all of the finalists were recognized by both their peers and faculty as talented public speakers and gifted actors, the winner of the 2011 Shakespeare competition was Rachel Ruller, who performed a rousing monologue from “The Taming of the Shrew.” Third place was awarded to Allie Aiello, and Michael Druker was the runner up.

In past years, the winner of the school-wide competition has advanced to the regional round, where he or she competes against students from other schools in the area. This time, however — perhaps because of scheduling issues — senior Dana Gough was selected after performing in her grade-wide run-off to represent the Academies at the regional competition. Dana placed 2nd in this contest, which was held on February 13th.

Although Dana did not officially compete in the school-wide round, she did perform her monologue along with the other eight contestants, to the great delight of the audience.

Performing a Shakespeare monologue in front of the entire school is not an easy task, but the participants in this year’s competition were fabulous; congratulations, of course, to both Dana and Rachel for truly excelling.