
With the red carpet rolled out, spotlights waving skyward and film stars converging on the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, many worldwide will turn their attention to the televised Academy Award ceremonies this Sunday, March 10. There will be plenty of local interest too, as 2004 Mountlake Terrace High School graduate Lily Gladstone is seen as one of the favorites to win the Oscar in the “Best Actress in a Leading Role” category for her role as Mollie Burkhart in the movie Killers of the Flower Moon.
Academy Award parties will certainly be popping up all around South Snohomish County on Sunday night, but ground zero for Lily Gladstone fever will undoubtedly be inside the Mountlake Terrace High School theater where more than 100 theater students, alumni, family and friends will gather in hopes of watching their favorite win on Oscar night.
“I’m super excited to celebrate her successes — as I would be for any and all of my alumni,” said long-time Terrace Drama Department head Jeannie Brzovic.
The buzz for Sunday has filtered down to current students in the school’s theater program, even though none of them had been born when Gladstone walked the halls and performed in the Mountlake Terrace High School theater in the early 2000s.
“It’s really cool knowing that someone who has been nominated for an Oscar has done the same kind of acting and been in the same space that you are,” said Terrace junior Elio Isley.
Isley, who has been involved in various theater groups since the third grade, was first exposed to Gladstone in a movie trailer that included a clip of the 2004 Terrace grad. “I saw a trailer for a movie and then heard later that it was Lily Gladstone and thought, ‘Oh wow, she went to our school,’” Isley said.
Isley plans on attending Sunday’s Oscar party at the school, as does senior Collin Fahey, who only caught the theater bug himself a few years ago.
“It was 2021, the (Terrace) production for Legally Blonde the Musical and I didn’t have much to do after school so I just kind of wandered the halls,” Fahey explained. “I stumbled into here (the school’s theater) .. and ‘Brz’ (Jeannie Brzovic’s long-time nickname among her theater students and alumni) kind of roped me in. I got in as an extra without even auditioning. Since then I’ve been auditioning regularly.”
In his three years of involvement in Terrace theater productions, Fahey has grown to not only love it but also appreciate those who came before him.
“You can go up into the rafters here,” Fahey said, “and see names and phone numbers written on the walls (a practice of past theater students — and not necessarily approved by Brzovic). There’s a lot of history here; you definitely feel a connection here with people that have been here before.”
Although Gladstone graduated from Terrace nearly 20 years ago, Fahey feels a strong connection to her as they were both taught in the classroom and directed in theater shows by Brzovic. “That’s a shared experience with so many people that have been here in the past,” he added.

Isley and Fahey are both involved in the school’s next stage production, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, slated for performances in late May. And while auditions for that show did draw a few new faces to the theater, Isley, Fahey and Brzovic all agree that there really has been no great influx of interest in the school’s drama department despite all the local, national and international Oscar hype for Gladstone.
“Even if we did have more interest in the program, we don’t have the classes to put students in,” said Brzovic, who has seen the number of MTHS classes offered in acting and theater production cut in half over the past year.
“The drama program has tried to stay as visible as possible this year,” Brzovic said, bemoaning recent districtwide cuts in performing arts programs. “We did two shows per semester even though there was no class to support them; we just did it all extracurricularly.”
Interest in theater production and performance may have stayed flat among Terrace students during this Oscar season, but there has been plenty of attention driven toward the school’s drama department from national and international media. British-based news organization Reuters and nationally syndicated entertainment show Access Hollywood have been granted entrance into the Terrace theater on Sunday, along with a number of local news outlets, all hoping Gladstone’s fate will bring joyful reactions from party attendees.
“Oh, she’s definitely going to win,” Fahey said.
— By Doug Petrowski
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