On the Fringe

Above: The cast of The Dolls of New Albion: A Steampunk Opera—a 90-minute musical directed by dual theater and computer science major Michael Donnelly—take a bow during the 2023 UMass Fringe Fest.

On the ground floor of the Bromery Center for the Arts, students hang wide strips of white fabric adorned with cryptic black symbols from the rigging in the ceiling. The panels form a semi-circle in the middle of the Curtain Theater, the UMass Amherst Department of Theater’s “black box” space.

Later, it will be revealed that each panel is designated for a different character in The Insanity of Mary Girard, a play first published in 1979 and interpreted for the 2023 Fringe Fest by theater major Liv Darling. “I’ve never been an on-stage person,” Darling admits. Nevertheless, she has a passion for theater. When she toured UMass as a high school student, she met Julie Fife, the theater department's full-time production manager, who told her all about stage management. Darling started her academic career committed to learning everything she could about running a live production and spent the last three years honing her chops. Producing Mary Girard gives her the opportunity to put the skills she’s developed into practice.

Scene from The Insanity of Mary Girard. Photo by Sena Yacteen.

Darling’s production is one of several that comprise Fringe Fest—an annual festival 100 percent driven by students who apply what they’ve learned at UMass Amherst and spearhead independent projects.

“One of the many goals of Fringe Fest is for students to learn to produce their own works,” says Willow Cohen, the theater department's general manager. “This means students are choosing plays (or other works of art), building creative teams, holding auditions and running rehearsals, creating timelines and deadlines, applying for grants and building budgets, and layering in any technical elements—all with the goal of presenting their works to the public by a certain date.” Taking place in spaces throughout the Bromery Center for the Arts and other locations across campus, Fringe Fest events are free and open to the community, adding to the rich cultural offerings available at UMass Amherst.

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Showcasing Original Work

Through her original play, Dear Berenson: Isabella Stewart Gardener and Her Museum, Ulrika Brand examines the complicated and unconventional life of the art collector and philanthropist who founded the famous Boston museum that bears her name. Brand hosted a reading of the intricate work-in-progress, which spans continents and decades. “Fringe Fest is an eclectic festival, so people can pick and choose what interests them,” Brand says. “For me, having a reading like this is an important part of the writing process,” she explains, pointing out that readings give audiences, who may be used to seeing full productions, a chance to understand what goes into making a play.

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Claudia Maurino, a double major in theater and gender studies, directed a production of her original play, Beatrice's Dragon: A Tavern Tale, which she wrote in fall 2022 for a playwriting class. Beatrice's Dragon tells the story of three women who work at a tavern in a small town and whose once-stagnant lives are changed forever by the discovery of a dragon egg in the middle of the woods. Devolving into fantasy, Maurino's story explores motherhood, grief, choice, agency, and "the ability to unstick yourself from a situation you're caught in." The performance is part of Maurino's process of new play development and comes about after edits, revisions, and work with a dramaturg. 

Testing the Limits

Some Fringe Fest productions push the boundaries of what theater means. In addition to presenting plays, musicals, and dramatic readings, the festival features visual art installations, innovative uses of physical or virtual space, and even an “alternate reality game.” Percival Hornak’s The Parable Task asks participants to suspend belief and inhabit the UMass campus as characters populating the fictional Moradna University. “We built community and our relationships to the space of the UMass campus were transformed,” recalls Hornak. During the game—co-designed by Caleb Bailey, Cameron Hoskins, Elie Abramovich, Crow Traphagen, and Luna Barros—players were asked to visit physical locations, find clues, and collaborate in online spaces to investigate and solve a mystery. A mash-up of immersive theater and the “choose your own adventure” genre, The Parable Task offered a week-long “prelude to the Fringe Fest in terms of inviting folks to think more playfully and get them excited for seeing a lot of theater and engaging with a lot of different fictional worlds.”

Left: Sophia Schweik’s Redefining Resilience installed in the main corridor of the arts bridge in the Bromery Center for the Arts. Right: Sophia Schweik in the Studio Arts Building photo lab.

For her project, Redefining Resilience, Sophia Schweik—a Bachelor's Degree with Individual Concentration (BDIC) student who built a major around creation, marketing, and documentation—combines the medium of photography with personal stories to spark a conversation about coping in healthy ways and how people support each other as a community and society, and provide a space for learning, play, and discussion. “The goal of this is to have the audience leave asking what they can do to help themselves in times that are difficult,” explains Schweik. Viewers of the photo installation, a hanging sculpture created from the test strips generated from printing analog photography, are invited to draw on and manipulate the piece, both recording their responses and adding them to the artwork itself.

Drishti Chauhan’s Hiroshima is a one-minute light installation that reflects on John Hersey’s gripping work of nonfiction by the same name. Left: Drishti Chauhan in the UMass Light Lab. Right: Scenic design graduate student Drishti Chauhan and lighting design HyeJung Kang stand in front of the Hiroshima light installation.

Technically Speaking

The UMass theater department is known not only for training actors, directors, and dramaturgs, but also for cultivating talented, sophisticated, and scrappy theater technicians, including set designers, lighting designers, and sound engineers. "You're not just learning how to achieve certain artistic goals," explains Michael Donnelly, who directed the musical The Dolls of New Albion for Fringe Fest, "you're gaining specialized, technical skills like the operation of power tools, carpentry, welding, and learning how electricity works so you can safely move around big lights." Many graduates of UMass theater go on to work professionally behind the scenes on Broadway and other landmarks of live performance, the most famous of whom is probably David Korins, the design mind behind sets for the smash hit Hamilton, performances by Lady Gaga and Mariah Carey (to name just two), and the Academy Awards.

For Fringe Fest, students drive design from concept to fruition—generating sketches, sourcing materials, sewing costumes, coordinating construction, and overseeing installation. Most critically, they’re responsible for finding the funds and writing grants to support their projects and effectively leading the teams who will build them.

Eloise Arnold tailors a garment in the Laura Bailey Costume Studio. Arnold is the costume designer for The Dolls of New Albion.

Follow the Leader

According to Christopher Baker, associate professor of dramaturgy and chair of the theater department, Fringe Fest provides a vehicle for students to learn about leadership, not in a “top-down, hierarchical way.” Instead, successful productions are pulled off by implementing “servant leadership,” where students assemble a talented team and empower each member to “do their best thing.” Effective leadership, says Baker, “doesn’t mean telling everybody what to do. It means getting people to do, and learning from them.”

Below: A selection of poster design submissions by students in Jan Sabach's Fundamentals of Graphic Design course.

A Collaborative Art

By nature, theater-making is collaborative. Without effective communication and teamwork between directors, designers, dramaturgs, and actors, the final performance seen on stage could never happen. In this spirit, the theater department's public relations director, Anna-Maria Goossens, works with students in the architecture department's Fundamentals of Graphic Design course to create the poster that promotes Fringe Fest throughout the community. "It’s a win-win collaboration because we get a beautiful poster," says Goossens, "and the design students get a 'real-world' project to practice their skills on and potentially add to their portfolios."

The importance of collaboration is a theme that the student directors of Fringe Fest repeat—many insist that their projects belong to the whole cast and crew, not just themselves. "I'm very proud of the group of people who have been so deeply invested [in my play] from the very beginning," Maurino affirms. "I'm blown away at how much care and thought the actors were all putting into their roles and their characters," she says. "That they have that sort of faith and trust in this silly little thing that I wrote is really fantastic and beautiful, and I'm very grateful."

This story was published in June 2023.