It’s not every day that a Chilmark resident dominates the Oscar stage. But on Sunday, May 24, Zada Clarke 6th hushed a busy room of international students, parents and teachers during her commencement address as the lone student speaker to the 2015 graduates of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Hollywood, California. Dressed like Diane Keaton with a Vineyard twist — freshly-picked flowers lacing her top bun — Clarke took the audience on a journey. “The house is quiet,” she said in a soothing voice. “Your hands are sweaty, your heart is thumping against your chest, creaky flutters run up your spine . . . You are in a war torn town, a dirty hotel room, a Russian Garden. Words spill from your mouth . . . You are not there, yet more present than you’ve ever felt. This is the thrill of creating something so ephemeral, yet so concrete in its purpose. Of creating another being from your own self.”

Zada Clarke completed her two-year acting program at the acting repertoire this week and has plans to continue to hone her career through hard work, dedication, and a great unknown creative world ahead of her. Joining her at graduation were her brother, Zoli Clarke, a boat builder at Gannon and Benjamin, her mother, Zada Clarke, a landscape architect in Chilmark, and her father Jack Reed, who traveled from Colorado via a two-day train-ride (and who for many years sold wheat grass at the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market).

Leaving the Island and heading to Hollywood is no small matter, especially when entering the Dolby Theater through a mass of Memorial Day tourists and their entertainers. Just like in the movie Birdman, Hollywood Boulevard was littered with people dressed as robots, pirates, superheroes, Marilyn Monroe — you name it they were trolling the tourists on Sunday. The buzz included men playing drums on upside down buckets, a massive crowd surrounding a street performance, and then a live stage with actors and models luring the public in for free on-sight makeovers. For Zoli it was a car, a boat, a bus, a plane and a whole lot of hullabaloo towards that mess of Hollywood raucous — all to support his older sister on stage.

Zada was the calm to that Hollywood storm, her speech following that of famed Hollywood director, Nick Cassavetes, of movies like The Notebook and The Other Sister who wore a track suit and a Kangol hat and used more expletives than adjectives in his speech. This was the antidote, the Chilmark girl gone California, here to remind those stuck in flight what it might one day mean to actually land. “We are suddenly aware of our seeming inadequacy. We doubt our right to say we are actors because our IMDB page is still floating in the abyss of unmade dot coms, or the paparazzi mob is not following us to the grocery store. Because our resumes are filled with that one short film that paid in granola bars, and twenty five school plays all performed in classroom 1D,” she told the crowd.

“Our job demands that we live with a keen eye to the details of human interaction, that we lead with empathy and compassion. That we scour life with a fine tooth comb to discover sweet little surprises, as well as the dark gritty holes where the pain resides. Because when we come alive so does the stage, the screen, the script, and the audience.”

Behind her, on the stage of the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, same stage where the Academy Awards are held every year, sat a line of faculty, who nodded their heads in agreement as Zada tore down the veneers of a Hollywood that could, if a young actress let it, destroy the soul. Instead, she built up the hidden and important integrity of every great actor, something she surely learned growing up on the Vineyard, raised by a very good mother.

“I can awaken you and at the same time awaken myself,” she said in a mock-up litany for the rude A-lister at a party attempting to size up young new talent based on their resume. “What I do is essential to humanity. I am an actor, I tell our story.”

Merissa Nathan Gerson is a writer who lives in Los Angeles and Chilmark.