For a theatre major who would rather be backstage with the lighting than bathed in a spotlight out front, Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a technical wonderland. The 2016 festival consisted of 50,266 performances of 3,269 shows in 294 venues. And there, getting things done at Venue 13, was intern Frankie Outlaw ’18.
“One of the best part about my internship was that I had a hand in nearly every aspect of running a theatre space. My responsibilities included, but were not limited to: running lights and sound for shows, changing sets over between shows, assisting the visiting artists, ushering, manning the box office, cleaning toilets,” Outlaw says. “It was a fast-paced environment, and there was a lot of hard work involved, but I loved every second of it.”
Mark Cryer, associate professor of theatre, secured the internship for Outlaw, whose interest is the technical side of theatre. Her tenure at Hamilton coincided with the opening of the new Kennedy Center for Theatre and the Studio Arts, which includes, among other things, two state-of-the art performance spaces. “Especially for a technical theatre student, being able to work with the brand new equipment in the Kennedy Center is very cool,” Outlaw says.
But the moment that stands out for her at Hamilton took place not in the Romano Theatre but outside the Kennedy Center in the amphitheater by the pond. It was the annual student outdoor production of a Shakespearean play.
“Rehearsals start a few weeks before the semester starts, and the show goes up in the first or second week of classes. Though we receive support from the faculty, the production is entirely student led, designed, and directed. I was lucky enough to be able to participate last summer, when we did A Midsummer Night's Dream, and it's one of the best memories I've made at Hamilton,” she says. Being a relatively small department, we theatre majors, minors, and enthusiasts tend to get close anyway, but Midsummer allowed us to bond quite a bit over our shared passion. The end result was a show that was really the sum of all our ideas and talents, and we were all very proud of it.”
Outlaw minors in Japanese and religious studies.