29th Annual CFA Fringe Festival Puts Women in the Spotlight
This year’s offerings—two operas and two theater productions—run through December
Janae Peterson (CFA’25) (center), Amy Wang (CFA’25) (left), and Abigail Cunningham (CFA’25) during the final tech rehearsal for The Eleanors, a new opera by Jodi Goble that focuses on the lives of women on the home front during the final year of World War II.
29th Annual CFA Fringe Festival Puts Women in the Spotlight
This year’s offerings—two operas and two theater productions—run through December
This article was originally published in BU Today on October 9, 2025. By Sophie Yarin. Photos by Kelly Davidson
EXCERPT
The Boston University Fringe Festival, a nearly three-decade-old tradition featuring performances by students in CFA’s School of Theatre and Opera Institute, rarely plans its repertoire around an official theme. The goal of the annual festival, whose name comes from the world-renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is to uplift new, rarely performed, and reimagined works and offer emerging performers, directors, and designers a real-world exercise in stagecraft.
“We’re looking at adaptations, old stories seen in new ways, and topics that have been in our zeitgeist for a long time, but are revisited by a new composer, lyricist, or playwright,” says Kirsten Greenidge, a CFA professor of playwriting and School of Theatre director. “We have works that look at topics, time periods, or issues of social justice through a contemporary lens.”
“I would love to be able to say that we started with this theme, but sometimes we realize these things after the fact,” says William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music and Opera Institute artistic director. “There are so many layers to choosing our [annual] repertoire. In some ways it’s surgical, because we want to make sure that every soprano gets a role and every tenor gets a role, and so on. But you can start to see a larger story among these pieces, and the program may evolve that way.”
The festival begins with The Eleanors, a genre-bending opera by Jodi Goble, a former CFA lecturer in opera and former senior vocal coach and coordinator of opera programs for the BU Tanglewood Institute. Suffused with the irresistible energy of 1940s swing music, as well as needle-drop moments from the Great American Songbook, the story centers around the hopes, dreams, and fears of three women on the American homefront during the final fraught year of the Second World War.
In contrast, the second Fringe Fest offering from the Opera Institute, Thumbprint, is a dark tale, inspired by the true story of Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani activist known internationally for bringing the men who raped her to court and making history in her country’s legal system. The opera, with music by Kamala Sankaram and a libretto by Susan Yankowitz, is a melange of Western and Hindustani influences on both the storytelling and the music.
The last two productions are part of a packed School of Theatre season, in response to a recent influx of enrollment within the school’s performance program.
This year’s third Fringe Fest piece is Fefu and Her Friends, written by decorated Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornés and first performed in 1977. Unlike most BU Fringe fare, the play has found its place time and again on stages across the country and in syllabi as a cornerstone of modern feminist theater. Fefu is set in 1935 in the title character’s New England country home over the course of one tense day as friendships are tested and the eight female characters contend with restrictive societal roles.
The last School of Theatre production, Calf Scramble, is a darkly humorous, visceral examination of girlhood that has five Texas teenagers wrestling with notions of God, expectation, and exploitation while raising their prize-winning cattle. In contrast with Fefu, Calf Scramble, written by Libby Carr, is less than two years old. Developed in 2023 and awarded the 2024 Dr. Kerry English Artist Award at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, it will debut off-Broadway in 2026.
BU’s Fringe Festival
Amplying new or rarely produced opera and theatre works
The annual Boston University Fringe Festival, now in its 29th season, is a collaboration between the College of Fine Arts School of Music: Opera Institute and School of Theatre. Fringe’s mission is to produce new or rarely performed significant works in the opera and theatre repertoire, bringing performances and audiences together in unique theatrical settings. For over two decades, Fringe Festival at BU has celebrated and amplified new work, shown in spare and minimal productions.