All the World’s a Stage at 27th Annual CFA Fringe Festival
All the World’s a Stage at 27th Annual CFA Fringe Festival
The monthlong celebration of new and unique stage productions features plays, operas, and student works in progress
Laura Beth Couch (CFA’24) (left) and Madalyn Ivy (CFA’24) rehearse a number for the historical opera Alice Tierney, one of two being performed at the 27th annual BU Fringe Festival. Photos by Jake Belcher
This article was originally published in BU Today on October 12, 2023. By Sophie Yarin
“Movies will make you famous, television will make you rich, but theater will make you good,” Tony Award–winning actor Terrence Mann once said.
For nearly three decades, the BU Fringe Festival has been a proving ground for student performers, offering them a chance to hone their skills and expand their horizons. The much anticipated offering from the College of Fine Arts consists of a monthlong lineup of student-led productions that probe the boundaries of traditional theater and uplift new, unique, and rarely performed pieces.
Taking its name from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a three-week international arts and culture blitz popularly considered the “world’s largest performance arts festival,” BU’s iteration focuses primarily on theater and opera productions produced in collaboration with the Schools of Music and of Visual Arts. This year’s offerings are seven works-in-development by students, one play, two operas, two musical performances, and an art exhibition, says Susan Mickey, a CFA professor of costume design and director of the School of Theatre.
“Starting off the school year seeing exciting original work is the best way to engage in campus life and the art we make,” Mickey says. “It is a lively hive of creative energy all along the Arts Corridor section of Commonwealth Avenue.”
The festival began in September with the Next Stage Workshops series, a selection of new and/or unfinished works by undergrad and graduate students. A new addition to the festival lineup as of 2022, Next Stage is curated by playwright Kirsten Greenidge (Milk Like Sugar, Luck of the Irish), a CFA associate professor of playwriting and of theater arts.
“The Next Stage Workshops are a behind-the-scenes glimpse of these plays as they’re being born,” Greenidge says. “You won’t see a set or hear sound design, and there will not be costumes per se; some just have students with a music stand and their script… These works are like toddlers learning how to run.”
The final Next Stage production for the 2023 season, Ginkgo Express, is an apocalyptic fairy tale of a young man whotakes a train across the Pacific Oceanto save the world’s last two ginkgo trees. On the opposite side of the ocean, with the doomsday clock ticking, a young woman awaits his arrival and her own uncertain future. The piece, written by Brandon Zang (CAS’25) and directed by Teri McMahon, will run October 13 and 14 at CFA.
“These stories are meant to be shared with not just a student’s immediate surroundings, but with BU and Boston as a whole,” Greenidge says, “and it’s really important that student playwrights get the support they need to find their voice.”
Left: Malik Mitchell (from left), Janelle Grace (CFA’24), and Sage Gunning (CFA’24) rehearsing a scene for Marcus; Or The Secret of Sweet, one of this year’s Fringe Festival showcase performances. Right: Mitchell, Grace, and Gunning during a rehearsal for Marcus; Or The Secret of Sweet.
The School of Theatre also puts on a formal stage production—complete with costumes, sets, and a polished script. This year’s production is Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, directed by Roz Bevan (CFA’18), which takes the audience back to New Orleans in 2005, just days before Hurricane Katrina strikes. During this time, Marcus, a young Black man struggling with his sexuality, keeps having oddly prophetic dreams about a mysterious man and a torrent of rain.
Marcus is the conclusion of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy, first performed in 2009 at theMcCarter Theatre Center, in Princeton, N.J. McCraney, the Eugene O’Neill Professor in the Practice of Playwriting at Yale, wrote the Academy Award–winning screenplay for Moonlight (2016). Performances run from October 20 to 23 at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre.
This year’s Fringe Festival will also see two opera productions, each focused on distinct and contrasting times in American history. The first, Alice Tierney, tackles the true story of a woman found hanged in Philadelphia in 1880. Over a century later, with no insight as to how she came to die, a group of graduate students investigating the site take it upon themselves to search for answers. Alice Tierney, composed by Melissa Dunphy and with a libretto by Jacqueline Goldfinger, was first performed in January 2023 at the Oberlin Conservatory. Tierney comes to life again from October 13 through 15 at Studio ONE, with the help of music director Allison Voth, a CFA associate professor of music, and stage director Claire Choquette.
The second opera, Hydrogen Jukebox, uses selected works by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg as its libretto and touches on a period from the 1950s through the 1980s marked by counterculturalism, anti-war sentiment, and environmentalism. Underscored by the evocative minimalism of composer Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox is an homage to mid-20th-century America as told by two of its great artists. First performed in May 1990 at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., it was interpreted for this year’s Fringe Fest by music director Matthew Larson, a CFA senior lecturer, vocal coaching, and stage director Sarah Dahnke. Catch it October 27 through 29 at Studio ONE.
According to William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music and BU Opera Institute artistic director, a few factors delineate this year’s opera programming.
“For one thing, they’re in English,” Lumpkin says. “They’re relatively short, and the unique thing about the Fringe Festival [operas] is that they are in a very intimate venue—much of the audience will be less than five feet away from the singers.
“Our other productions tend to be more traditional operatic programming,” he adds. “The purpose of the Fringe Festival has always been to have students, involved faculty, and audiences explore new or unusual works that maybe haven’t been performed very often, and to provide them with a wider variety of experience while they’re here.”