Fringe Festival Not a Wrong Choice

Over the weekend, the UWSP Student Players Alliance put on their annual Fringe Festival. The show is a collection of eight ten-minute plays and is entirely student-run.

Ryan McDowell, senior Bachelor of Fine Arts musical theatre major is the president of UWSP Student Players Alliance, a student organization on the campus. McDowell has been involved with Fringe Festival since his freshman year.

“Fringe is a great way for our students to showcase their work that they do outside of mainstage productions,” McDowell said. “This is Players’ way of giving opportunities to those who aren’t getting it in the department that semester. It’s completely student-driven, student-written, student-designed, student-produced. We really strive to hone abilities. I think it’s just a fun way for us to get to create our own theatre world inside of this already bigger theatre world.”

Work on Fringe Festival begins every year during the fall semester. The first step is to establish that year’s theme. The UWSP Student Players Alliance opens to campus for suggestions, after which the board of the organization will choose one that suits the season and has enough variation to allow a variety of different plays.

This year’s theme was “I Chose Wrong.”

All eight of the student-written plays had something to do with this theme.

Emma Kiel is a senior drama major and the artistic director of this year’s Fringe Festival. Though each play has its own director, Kiel was in charge of achieving unity throughout the entire production.

“Basically, we put on this show that’s little vignettes of the student-written plays,” Kiel said. She explained that submissions are taken from all students on campus, not just those within the Department of Theatre and Dance. “It’s really cool to get those people involved too.”

Fringe Festival has a unique morphology from mainstage productions on campus. Instead of working within a hierarchy of professors and students, all those involved are on a level playing field.

“This is what a real-world production is like, and we’re getting to experience that,” McDowell said. “I think that’s a very necessary skill for both sides of the production team. We learn how to work one-on-one with each other to conquer problems, make art and be able to confidently put our artistic stamp of approval on something.”

The hard work put in by all the students involved showed when the production was brought to life. Each ten-minute play served as a different course in the same meal, all working towards the same theme regardless of distinct flavors.

Some plays dealt with roommates, lost bets, sexual assault and politics. However, the themes reached much further than these plots into ideas of guilt, loss and blame.

“A lot of these pieces will make you think,” McDowell said. “They’ll make you see things in a different way.”

McDowell hopes that audiences appreciate the strong themes and takes what they have encountered out of the theatre with them.

McDowell said he wants to “start a dialogue about something they’ve seen today because there’s a lot of different viewpoints from all eight of our directors and writers that are being showcased on stage, which I think is a very unique aspect about this year and with the theme that’s offered all of these different views of the world.”

Though pushing boundaries through art is one of the powerful aspects of Fringe Festival, it does carry a lighter side as well.

Kiel was proud of the diverse achievement everyone involved in the production sustained.

“It’s possible for young students who aren’t necessarily pursuing playwriting as a major to write plays and do it successfully. We have a wide variety of topics discussed tonight, so I hope that they are inspired by the work that we do,” Kiel said.

Though Fringe Festival has drawn to a close this year, the UWSP Student Players Alliance hopes that the university will keep Fringe in its thoughts for upcoming years.

“We aren’t a Noel Fine Arts Center group,” McDowell said. “We are a student alliance, and we want to bring art to those who haven’t chosen this as their path in life.”

Fringe Festival is open to all students on campus to get involved in theatre in any way that inspires them, whether it be acting or writing their own ten-minute plays.

 

Kathryn Wisniewski

Reporter

kathryn.e.wisniewski@uwsp.edu