Emory & Henry College Theatre Faculty Win Meritorious Achievement Awards

Three faculty members of the Emory & Henry College Theatre Department have won Meritorious Achievement Awards from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) for their work on the November 2011 musical A…My Name Will Always Be Alice.

Professor Daniel Wheeler won for excellence in design, Professor Christianne Roll won for excellence in musical direction, and Dr. Kelly Bremner won for excellence in stage direction. 

“The quality of the plays we put on in the Studio Theatre is very high, and I am delighted to have won this kind of award,” Bremner said. “I am very lucky to have students and colleagues as talented as I do.”

The awards are given by reviewers at fellow colleges, and are reserved for only the finest of college theatre productions. In the past year, two websites have ranked the Theatre Department among the best theatre education opportunities in Virginia.

“This past year we have won recognition from a number of publications on the quality of work we are doing as a department as a whole, but it feels great to also have an individual production recognized,” Bremner commented. 
When Alice was initially adjudicated, students Mary Sheridan, Rebecca Litton were also nominated to KCACTF for the competitive Irene Ryan acting awards, and Beth Loveland was recognized for her work in Stage Management. 

In addition to its broad-based general theatre major and minor, the E&H Theatre Department offers four areas of specialization: acting, directing, musical theatre, and production and design. Each of these pre-professional tracks is a separate, sequence-based training program with specialized course work in the chosen area. Both the general theatre major and the four specialized tracks combine in-depth academic preparation with extensive production work.

Started in 1969 by Roger L. Stevens, the Kennedy Center's founding chairman, the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival is a national theatre program involving 18,000 students from colleges and universities nationwide which has served as a catalyst in improving the quality of college theatre in the United States. The Festival has grown into a network of more than 600 academic institutions throughout the country, where theatre departments and student artists showcase their work and receive outside assessment by festival respondents.