After an award-winning production of “Horse Girls,” the Wayland High School Theater Ensemble (WHSTE) moved on to the second round of the 2022 Massachusetts High School Drama Festival. The next round will be held at Wayland High School.

Last weekend, the school competed in the preliminary rounds of events hosted by the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild (METG). Wayland High School is one of the 40 schools moving on to the next set of events, which will be happening on Saturday, April 2.

“I think it was one of our best performances, everyone was really happy with it,” sophomore stage manager Amelia Furlong said. “I personally would be very happy with a repeat.”

Many members of the cast won awards, including three actors who play the roles of Ashley, Tiffany and Margaret, the horse ensemble and Furlong. Furlong received an award for stage management.

“In addition to moving on in the competition, [winning makes] your cast and crew eligible for what are called the ‘All Star Company’ awards, which is an awards ceremony at the end of the day,” WHSTE director Aidan O’Hara said.

The competition was well-supported by the theater technicians during all the productions, with lighting design from junior Brennan Davies and sound design from sophomore Emmanuel Nzaramba. Nzaramba also won an award known as the David Dooley Unsung Hero Award, given out to hosting volunteers who embody and display the spirit of the festival.

“It feels really good to win the [David Dooley] award, it was a very unexpected award for me,” Nzaramba said.

Looking forward, the next stages of the event are different compared to how they were in previous years due to COVID-19. There will be less competitors and events as opposed to previous years.

“In a typical year, about 100 high schools from the state enter, and in March, 14 events would be held where teams would be selected for semi-finals, and the 100 would go down to 40,” O’Hara said. “From there, 14 schools would be chosen for finals in the last weekend of March, [or the] first weekend of April. [The finals] are a big, three day festival in a Boston theater. This year, there’s only 80 schools. Instead of the grand finals, 40 schools were chosen for what they’re calling the ‘regional finals,’ and that’s what’s coming up for us.”

Another unusuality that came with COVID-19 for the drama festival was the lack of schools that could host, allowing Wayland High School to host both rounds of the abridged competition.

“In order for a high school to be able to host an event like this, they really have to get permission from all the different administrators,” O’Hara said. “A lot of high schools weren’t able to pull it off even though they really wanted to, so there was an extra need. We’re hosting the preliminary and the regional rounds, so five new schools will be coming this Saturday.”

Next week, Furlong is hoping for a performance similar to the one they pulled off last week, but is wary of overestimating what they can pull off.

“I’d be happy with a repeat of last week,” Furlong said. “There’s this saying in theater, called the ‘second show trap,’ where you feel too confident, and you feel too good. Then you think ‘our first performance was epic, we don’t need to improve on anything,’ and I think we’re all trying to avoid that.”

WHSTE will be performing “Horse Girls” another two times, with one benefit performance on Friday, April 1, at 7 p.m., and the competition on Saturday, April 2, at 3:30 p.m. Furlong said that winning is not completely out of their grasp.

“I think that it would take something special [to win the competition],” Furlong said. “But we’re not out of the running. We’re a competitive group, and we hold our own with our other groups.”