Morgan, Harris win Critics’ Choice award

Junior Maelin Harris and senior Rebecca Morgan won the Critics’ Choice award for their duet performance at the North Carolina Thespian Festival. Photo by Hannah Field

By Catherine Lemel

The thespian troupe at Brevard High School traveled to the Thespian festival for an acting competition and seminars in everything from stage management to hip-hop dancing.

Junior Maelin Harris entered a duet scene with Senior Rebekah Morgan into an acting competition and won the honor of critics’ choice. Harris said that in the scene, Morgan played a sixteen year old girl who was engaged to her boyfriend. Harris played her cynical maid of honor who was sick of dress shopping. “Getting an award for this was so unexpected and exciting,” she said, “I walked up to the certificates hoping that I had won an award for some of the individual events that I had entered in but instead I was greeted by a crying Mrs. Shumate and ‘congratulations’ from all the other team members.”

Harris added that this was also the first time she had ever received this award. She said, “I have had the privilege to go to the festival and I remember watching the winners last year doing their performances and wondering, ‘What would it feel like to perform in front of ever North Carolina Thespian troupe,’ and now I know.” Harris also said that aside from herself and Morgan, there has only been one other student from Brevard High School that has received the honor of getting critics’ choice.

Harris concluded, “The funniest thing about the whole situation is that Morgan and I had rehearsed in the opposite roles but Mary Beth Shumate, the theater director, switched us at the last minute. If that does not show you how good she is at her job I don’t know what will.”

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