Updated, July 21
A group of students from the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School are about to embark on a trip they probably won’t forget.
Students in the school’s drama program are going to Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a global event where performers fill up hundreds of theaters and makeshift stages spread throughout the Scottish city over three weeks in August.
“It’s huge,” Charter School theater teacher Heather Capece said of the festival, and of the students’ opportunity to go and perform at the festival. “It’s a very rigorous festival to get accepted into.”
To that point, Capece said they are the only student group from Massachusetts that was accepted into this year’s festival.
The Charter School students will be performing an original adaptation of “Peter Pan,” which they are calling “The Quest to Save Neverland: An Epic Peter Pan and the Lost Souls Adventure.”
In Edinburgh, they’ll be performing a number of shows in the basement of a church. Because there are so many performances planned for the three days, the students have only 15 minutes to get their stage and props set up, 30 minutes to perform, and then 15 minutes to break down before the next troupe starts setting up. That quick turnaround takes a lot of practice.
Capece says that it’s all coming together in the last few days before they ship out. As part of their warm-up, the group will be performing a pair of shows at the Katharine Cornell Theater in Vineyard Haven this weekend, before they ship out to Scotland. The shows are Friday, July 21, at 6 pm and Saturday, July 22, at 2 pm. Part of the Tisbury performance is to raise money for the trip.
Capece said that she and her daughter wrote “Neverland” together. The play takes a more modern approach to Peter Pan, and deals with topics like gender norms. As the play’s teaser reads: “The darkness of today’s world has taken hold of children’s innocence and imagination. Peter, Hook, Tink, and the Lost Souls embark on a quest to rescue their home before the Darkness consumes Neverland.”
Capece says that she’s excited for her students to take in the experience of Fringe Fest. Aside from the exposure to the hundreds of performances, there are also workshops for students to learn new skills. But it also presents an opportunity for them to meet kids their own age who are into the same things.
The character names in the photo captions were updated.
