National Thespian Honor Society by Logan

National Thespian Honor Society by Logan - December 2019 Scholarship Essay

Beginning with my Sophomore year, I have had the privilege to attend Texas State Thespians Convention, and even before then I can recall competing at Texas State Junior Thespian Convention all three years of middle school. So, to say this Convention has impacted my career path would be an understatement! From competing in Solo Musical, Group Musical, and most recently Duet Musical Events, to participating in countless masterclasses on Laban, Viewpoints, Meisner, Stanislavsky, I have absorbed and taken advantage of the numerous resources Texas State Thespians offers. Yet, as I nostalgically look back on my numerous years at State, I have no doubt in regard to selecting an experience which helped solidify my theatrical career plan. I had come to the end of my freshman year and had yet to be cast in a department production, despite my best efforts. On the bright side, that following year I would be able to attend State Thespian Convention for the first time since Junior Convention. At our final Thespian meeting of the school year, Thespian Convention was brought up and my director announced we would be submitting a Mainstage play to be adjudicated at State. Auditions were to take place the following week and I was now awarded a final opportunity to be cast my freshman year. By the grace of my directors, I was cast in my first show at Marcus, a seven person play set in Ireland: Dancing at Lughnasa. Months of demanding rehearsals followed where I was tasked the goal of successfully portraying a 70 year old Catholic Pastor turned Tribesman, suffering from dementia and Malaria, who has recently returned home to Ireland after serving in Africa for 50 years. As I was a lanky, gay, Justin Bieber haired, 15 year old, recently turned sophomore with a deep rooted need to prove himself, this was quite the opposite of my type cast, and proved no small feat to achieve. And this time, by the grace of our adjudicators, our show was selected to perform as one of the 2017 Mainstage shows at Texas Thespian Convention. To this day, I can recall walking into the massive room we would be performing in hours later and being certain, more certain than I had been of anything in my life, that this was what I was meant to do. Performing on this stage in front of thousands of my fellow Thespians, able to do what I love and to share this experience with such a large passionate group of like minded individuals, is something I feel forever indebted to Texas Thespians for. This opportunity allowed me a chance to quite literally feel my future career path solidify during that two hour performance. This experience alone would have been more than enough to show me that I could pursue this as an actual career, but again by the grace of our audiences and adjudicators, I was awarded Best Overall Supporting Actor in a Mainstage Show for the 2017 Texas Thespian Convention. To receive such a positive response for something as vulnerable as acting, was and still is unfathomable. To see months of work validated by those in the field was incomprehensible. To know that at least one person saw an ounce of potential in that scrappy little upstart of a sophomore was unbelievable. And finally, to choose a theatrical career path is something I truly, from the bottom of my heart, owe to Texas Thespian State Convention.