CFA Faculty

CFA Students Bring Their Design Talents to World’s Largest Shakespeare Festival

Under the tutelage of School of Theatre’s Jon Savage, four CFA students created sets, costumes, and more for Craiova International Shakespeare Festival in Romania

Parrabbola’s production of Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of three plays they staged this year at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival. Four BU College of Fine Arts students designed the costumes and sets for the productions, all of which had to fit into six suitcases, so they could be easily transported from York, England, to Craiova, Romania.

This article was originally published in BU Today on June 16, 2026. By John O’Rourke. Photos by Jon Savage

Not only did the four students—Gus Kim (CFA’28), Benny Dietz (CFA’28), Ella Harris (CFA’28), and Kara Zacharewicz (CFA’27)—have to work at breakneck speed, but everything they created also had to fit in just six suitcases, so it could be easily transported by plane from England to Romania for the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, which ran from May 21 to 31. 

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The four worked under the tutelage of Jon Savage, CFA School of Theatre assistant professor of scene design, who had arranged the opportunity for them to work with Parrabbola. Savage had met Parrabbola’s artistic director, Philip Parr, last year when they were both teaching at the Prague Shakespeare Company’s Summer Intensive program. Savage had already developed a relationship with the company, and has been head of design there for the last two summers, bringing a small cohort of CFA students to work on productions. He and Parr began to explore what opportunities there might be for BU design students to engage in and experience a European style of theatre making. The collaboration between BU and Parrabbola grew out of those conversations.

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[Left image]: The BU design team’s first meeting with the Parrabbola casts. The students designed sets and costumes for Parrabbola’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Romeo and Juliet at this year’s Craiova International Shakespeare Festival. [Right image]: Gus Kim (CFA’28) (far right) teaches the Elizabethan-era game nine men’s morris to festival goers during the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival.

The students embraced the chance to move beyond their respective areas of expertise—costume design, scenic design, lighting, and sound—and develop new skills.

For Zacharewicz, who is majoring in scene design, that meant pivoting to making costumes. “It was nice to sew again for a production, since I don’t typically do that anymore,” she says. “I love giving actors costumes and seeing how they react to them.” 

In addition to mending, cleaning, and altering existing costumes in Parrabbola’s inventory, the students had to create costumes from scratch for the cast and for the six court jesters, who would be entertaining crowds throughout Craiova’s Shakespeare Village during the festival. And they also had to recreate and construct three Elizabethan-era games—a version of nine men’s morris, quoits, and skittles—each of which is referenced in various Shakespeare plays. Once in Craiova, they were tasked with dressing in period costumes and running the games. 

The designing experience required ingenuity and rapid problem-solving—such as figuring out how to make Hippolyta and Theseus’ costumes disappear in a matter of seconds, so that the actors playing those roles could rapidly transform into Titania and Oberon, respectively. 

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Savage says he’s working on securing funding to offer several additional international experiences for CFA students in the future. He has already been invited to return to Craiova with Parrabbola in 2028, and he is in the early stages of developing collaborations with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, University of Gloucestershire in England, Bangkok University in Thailand, and the Armenian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. And he hopes to create an opportunity for CFA performance students to work with the York International Shakespeare Festival as early as next spring. 

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