KCACTF Region VII in Idaho 2

This is a photograph I took of our acting coach, Mindi Logan, helping one of our Irene Ryan Nominees, Philip Orazio, work on a scene from Love is a Time of Day the night before the semi-final round. It was too priceless not to post.
The semi-final round, by the way, went very well. There were a lot of talented people in the thirty-two of us that were passed on.
Last night we received the results about who will be performing in the final round of the Irene Ryan competition. Only sixteen out of the original one hundred and fifty compete in this round, and I am pleased to announce that three people from the University of Portland will be competing; Philip Orazio, Brittney Harris, and myself. This is my second year in a row of making it to the finals, and I am so stoked! I'm also really proud that so many of us will be there.
I've seen two university productions since I last blogged. Linfield College from back in Oregon put on their production of Crave a piece by the highly depressed British playwright of the 90's, Sarah Kane, and Boise State put on their production of August Strinberg's famous post psychotic break show, A Dream Play. Needless to say, it's been a heavily psychological last few evenings. Good job to Linfield and Boise for successfully bringing in shows!
Also, yesterday, I watched the keynote speaker of the festival, Oskar Eustis, speak. He is the current artistic director of The Public Theater in New York, and is rumored to be the next Joseph Papp, founder of Shakespeare in the park. Eustis' talk on bringing theatre back to the public and recreating it as an artform was immensily inspiring. He is very hopeful that theatre in the United States will find a rejuvenation in the current time of crisis and change just as it did during the The Great Depression of the 1930s, but that it is up to those of us who practice the craft to create that rejuvenation.