Three student actors, 45 minutes on an international stage

Inhabiting more than 20 different characters in 45 minutes, three Penn student actors performed selections from “365 Days/365 Plays” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, the largest arts festival in the world.

“It’s been pretty amazing getting to interact in such a convergence of cultures and to get to perform and see what resonates with different audiences,” says Anya Rothman, a third-year theatre arts major from Crozet, Virginia. Accompanying Rothman were third-year mathematics major Elliot Ross-Dick from Trinidad and Tobago and fourth-year comparative literature major Pandora Schoen from Macungie, Pennsylvania.

The trio’s performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Aug. 4-9 were the culmination of the spring semester Theatre Arts 1275: The Edinburgh Project course. Ahead of the troupe’s trip to Edinburgh, they returned to campus in July for several days of rehearsals at the Annenberg Center for Performing Arts.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe exposed the students to an array of ideas and approaches for the innovation of theatre, in addition to the opportunity to showcase their talents on the international stage.

Noah Levine, the associate director of Theatre Arts who was publicity and company manager, says the offering and experience is unique. “It’s a really deep process where they get to engage with this work in a couple different ways over a period of time,” he says.

“365 Days/365 Plays,” created in 2003 by Suzan Lori-Parks, was the outcome of writing a new play for every day of the year.

Director Margit Edwards picked the series partly to show how its themes have recontextualized their relevance in the present. “The beauty of the material provided by Suzan Lori-Parks is that no two productions will ever be the same,” she says. “Her work has given our students the opportunity to find their unique expression.”

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Edwards, a lecturer in the Theatre Arts Program who taught the class, worked with students to curate 10 short vignettes from the series. The chosen plays ranged in length from two to nine minutes, featuring goddesses, exiled kings, writers, and muses, the longest being a retelling of Oedipus.
 
Theatre Arts 1275: The Edinburgh Project has been taught at the College of Arts & Sciences for more than 35 years. During the spring semester, the trio, along with stage manager Beatriz Penzo-Mendez, a third-year theatre arts major from Philadelphia, worked with Edwards and Levine on every aspect of the production, from costumes and props to set pieces, lighting, and sound design. The collaboration also involved Philadelphia dance theatre artist Esther Baker. The team performed the work in an April showcase at Penn ahead of the international staging.

“Being a performer in such an artistic space, you can just feel how creative everyone is,” Schoen says. “When you see people do devised pieces, where it’s something that they created all on their own and put together, it makes you realize that your art doesn’t have to be perfect. Getting out there and performing is much more important than having something that takes you a very long time to do.”