Best Actor/Actress

1. Storm Kennedy StormKennedy.com.

2. Tom Wilson Facebook.com/Tom.Wilson.104855.

3. Bill Hulings Facebook.com/Bill.Hulings.

It’s starting to look like Eugene has found its perfect Storm.

With her decisive first-place win in this year’s best actor/actress category, Storm Kennedy has taken a hat trick, having also won the category in 2019 and 2018. That’s quite an accomplishment, considering she hasn’t performed live on a conventional stage — yes, the pandemic — since spring 2019, when she played the lead role of Margie in a wildly successful production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People at Oregon Contemporary Theatre.

But the effervescent Kennedy hasn’t exactly calmed down. Over the summer she continued to take part in small, COVID-safe outdoor readings of plays such as Love, Loss, and What I Wore and The Cemetery Club with an informal group in Albany.

At one recent reading, she says, 28 socially distanced audience members sat in a private backyard. “Everyone wore masks, except the actors,” she says. “But it was so heartwarming to be able to keep doing what we love to do. That’s what theater does.”

Besides those readings, though, she hasn’t even been to an audition in 2020. “There aren’t any,” she says. “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to act again.”