Photos courtesy of Kate Doak
The Fringe Festival, an annual student-run performance of skits, short films, spoken word, and stand up written and performed by Choate students, happened this Thursday, February 10 and Friday, February 11 in the Gelb Theater. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the festival.
The annual staging of student-written plays can be traced back many decades, though, to the 1990s. However, ten years ago, the Student Playwriting Festival was renamed to the “Fringe Festival” to encompass more genres and styles, such as short films, original music, spoken word or slam poetry, and later standup. The festival also became more reliant on student organization, as opposed to faculty.
“Every part of Fringe is done by students,” said Fringe Playwright Kenadi Waymire ’22. “That’s what makes it so fun.” The change also led to the establishment of the Fringe Board, a group of students in charge of selecting submissions and organizing and running the production.
Over the course of the last ten years, “hundreds of student artists have developed their skills as writers, poets, musicians, comedians, designers, production technicians, directors, and performers in the Gelb as part of the Fringe,” said Ms. Kate Doak, the faculty adviser to the festival.
The name Fringe Festival harkens back to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which began 75 years ago, when eight drama groups took advantage of the Edinburgh International Festival to showcase their styles of “alternative theater.” Choate embraced this idea, providing an alternative to the plays and musicals seasonally organized by the school. “It’s always been essential to me that Fringe empowers students to create their own art at the same time that they support and develop each other’s work,” said Ms. Doak.
After an online performance last year, the Fringe Festival will return to a masked in-person performance. There will be five plays: Demanding Demanders Make Demands of their Demanders, written by Waymire and directed by Athena Liu ’23; Overboard! written by Audrey Lim ’23 and directed by Gavin Doak ’22; The Sleepover, written by Mia Millares ’22 and directed by Sophia Dubbelde ’23; The Interrogation, written by Margarita Blackwood ’23 and directed by Tristin Hurst ’24; and Two Leaf, written by Jordan Azzinaro ’22 and directed by Gavin Doak ’23. The actors were chosen through an audition process in late 2021. There will also be a short film called Coffee, written by Kaleigh O’Leary ’22, and a few other acts that are yet to be finalized.
Waymire’s play, Demanding Demanders Make Demands of their Demanders, is a comedy about a lawyer, a doctor, and a veterinarian who set up shop in the same strip mall. Chaos ensues when three people find themselves needing help. Reflecting on writing the play, she said, “I just kind of worked on what I thought might be funny and finally settled on what I liked.”
In Lim’s play, the characters grapple with the question, “What would you jump overboard for?” and encourage the audience to ask themselves the same question. The process, Lim said, was tedious but enjoyable. “It’s revision after revision, draft after draft, until I think it’s ready.”
Lim’s favorite part of the process is watching the ideas come to life. “The best part is coming up with the idea, because your mind goes crazy thinking of the ‘what ifs’ in regard to plot,” she said.
Hurst became a Fringe Festival director after being selected from an application in the fall. When asked why he applied, he said, “Writing and directing has always been a passion of mine.”
Having directed a film over the summer and getting ready to direct another one in the coming weeks, he was glad to have the opportunity to get more involved in the art. Thinking about the process he had gone through, Hurst said, “It’s been really fun so far. The actors were very committed from the beginning.” He continued, “I have a stronger sense of my vision as a director because of the process.”
Ms. Doak said, “This year we have definitely seen that students are so energized and joyful during moments they can be together as part of an in-person rehearsal process or audience, so that togetherness is what is making theater at Choate so special this year, despite the masks.”
