Early High School cast, director honored for One-Act Play state championship
Standing outside the Brown County Courthouse Monday morning, cast members from Early High School’s One-Act-Play “Silent Sky” described their emotions at being crowned Class 3A UIL state champions on May 15 in Austin.
Overwhelming. Unbelievable. Like they were dreaming.
“We all jumped up, and then we all kind of buckled,” junior India Vogt said after her fellow cast mates and theatre director Caitlyn Tidwell were feted with a proclamation of recognition in the Brown County Commissioners Court meeting.
“Silent Sky” is a fictionalized story about a very real person — female astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who died in 1921 at the age of 53. She had been nominated for a Nobel Prize before her death. It is Early High School’s first state championship in One-Act Play competition.
The UIL academic website states:
“The UIL One-Act Play contest is a competition where similarly sized Texas schools present an 18-40 minute play and may be adjudicated by a panel of three judges or a single judge. The contest is held on a single day and open to the public. There are six possible levels of competition: Zone, District, Bi-Distrct, Area, Region, and State. At each level of competition a judge awards individual acting awards as well as selecting three productions to advance to the next level of competition up to the Regional Level where only two will advance to the State Level. After the awards are announced a Judge gives an oral critique to each of the schools.”
Monday morning, nearly two dozen “Silent Sky” cast members and their director filed into the commissioners courtroom, where Brown County Judge Shane Britton read the proclamation which stated the “Silent Sky” performance received three number-one rankings, the highest awards possible, from the judges.
“This is a huge deal for us,” director Tidwell said. “They set a goal for themselves to make it to area (competition). They made it to bi-district three years in a row. This year they wanted to get past bi-district and make it to area. This year we set the goal of making it to area and they worked harder than they ever have before.”
Britton said, “One-act” has kind of a special place in my heart. I realize the work that goes into it. It’s not easy. It’s not just going on stage and having fun. They knew it would require more of them.
“And quite frankly Early has some challenges that other schools don’t have because of not having their own dedicated work area. Anybody that’s been to Early knows that you share a cafeteria with theatre. They’ve overcome a lot through perserverance and hard work.”
Outside the courthouse, Tidwell explained more about “Silent Sky.”
“Silent Sky is a fictionalized account of the life of Henrietta Leavitt, who was a female astronomer at Harvard Observatory at the turn of the 20th century,” Tidwell said. “She was one of a bunch of unsung herores of that time, female astronomers who made discoveries that led to the big discoveries.”
“For example, her work led to the creation of the Hubble Telescope. Her work was what made it possible to measure the galaxy. She came up with a standard practice for measuring the distance between stars, using no technology, using only math and science and her eyeballs, and was able to make this standard that they could use to determine that the Milky Way was just our neck of the woods, and there is so much beyond.”
Cast members including Tidwell’s daughter, Andie, a graduating senior, described their state championship win.
“I feel like we could all feel it at the very end of our show — that we actually won, because it was that final moment, we heard so many people gasp and everybody was standing,” Andie said. “We got a standing ovation at state.”
“We were told earlier on that no other show had gotten a standing ovation,” graduating senior Zoe Phillips added.
Junior Abbygail Diaz explained that at the awards ceremony, third, second and first places were announced. “It was so surreal. We all couldn’t even comprehend what was happening,” she said.
Zoe Phillips added, “a lot of us thought that we had second (place) based on individual awards. So when the people that got the most individual awards went out second place, all of us were like …”
Her next words were drowned out by her cast mates’ excited crosstalk.
“We had to wait because the director got to go up first, and we had to wait before we could eventually go up,” graduating senior Presley Dunlap said.
“And,” Caitlyn Tidwell admitted, “it took me a second to go up because I was so stunned.”
“It felt like it wasn’t even real,” Andie Tidwell said. “We finally did it.”
