LoRen Seagrave (De’Andre) is a Freshmen attending UTK who started acting in the Clarence Brown Theatre’s acting workshop that they hold during the summer and continued to go year after year until COVID. He was adamant to go after seeing A Lesson Before Dying and getting to talk to the lead, Jude, who spoke with him after the show and became his first acting teacher at the summer camp. He started working at Austin-East on competition pieces for local tournaments and brought one to districts and state and won first place. In the next couple of years, he volunteered in community plays held by local theaters and got a lead role in his first professional play at the start of 2020. He also has won the Clarence Brown Theatre’s ACE awards for Dramatic Monologue and Contemporary Monologue. He loves Dominique Morisseau’s work while being really connected to Omari from Pipeline, pushing his school to put it on as a one-act. He wants to embody the misunderstood and outcasted in his work and was ecstatic to be a part of this show. He believes there is an unmeasurable amount of pain and hurt in those who have been forgotten and wants to tell their stories. What he wants people to take away from his work is, “I want to be the thing that moves the person watching me to be human and really challenge them to think about life other than their own. Just because not all of us can see the pain doesn’t mean it’s not still there.”