Teen thespians baskincarnegie’s victory
With an enrollment of only 590, Carnegie Vanguard High School recently demonstrated howwell the acting chops of its students match against thespian teams from the state’s largest schools.
A Carnegie group wowed its way in May to the Class 5A state championship in the University Interscholastic League One-Act Play competition in Austin with a production of the challenging Australian play “When the Rain Stops Falling.”
In addition, senior Justin Lau of southwest Houston was awarded best actor and Westbury freshman Jackson Burnham and Meyerland sophomore Anastasia Vayner were named to the state all-star cast.
Carnegie, at 1501 Taft and West Gray, competed in 5A because of its status as a magnet school for gifted and talented students, theater director Steward Savage said.
“It’s a credit to a small school,” Principal Ramon Moss said. “Gifted and talented students know no boundaries. We don’t want to be the best-kept secret in town anymore.”
“The last time a team from (Houston Independent School District) advanced to state was 2004,” said Don Hernandez, HISD’s manager of UIL activities. “That was Bellaire High School, and they didn’t win.”
This was the 88th annual state one-act play contest.
“That totally boosted my ego,” Vayner said of her and her team’s triumph. “The judges said beautiful things to us in the critique after the performance. They were really nice to us.”
The competition “was a scary process, but I knew what to expect,” said Burnham, explaining that, as a student at Pin Oak Middle School, he had played Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet” and Abe Simon in “The KentuckyCycle: Fire in the Hole,” when those productions competed in junior high UIL one-act play contests.
“The best thing is the sense of family you have at theendof the process,” said Burnham, whose parents, Jon and Jana Burnham, attended every performance of the play, including the finals at Bass ConcertHall at
the University of Texas.
Savage said the play’s compelling family saga takes the audience back and forth in time from 1959 to 2039, from London to Australia. With four generations of fathers and sons, the play is epic in scope, yet at the same time extraordinarily intimate, said Savage, a graduate of Yale School of Drama who read about 110 plays before deciding that Carnegie should perform “When the Rain Stops Falling” in the competition.
The students said they learned how to speak in British and Australian accents with the aid of AccentHelp.com, a tool provided by Westbury actors Jim and Carolyn Johnson.
“It was a little challenging, because you didn’t want the accent to be too light, but you didn’t want it to be cartoonishly deep,” said sophomore Nicholas Michel, 15, who played the character of Andrew.
Other members of the state champion cast were Sergio Infante, Eviva Kahne, Edwin Mendoza and Kerrigan Quenemoen.
The state champion crew included Jin Ah Kim, Maral Gaeeni, Nashua Haydon, Sonia Margolin and Isabela Vazquez.
Alternates were Gebriella Hailemariam, Benjamin Oxley, Hailey Strader andTrevor Stoneburner.