Festival Talk: In Conversation with Brooke O'Harra and Molly McCaffrey

Out of the Dark premiered in February of 2026. This winter performance festival was dedicated to contemporary and original theater, dance, performance, film, and fine art created by Penn students and hosted by the Theatre Arts program. Performances included original works submitted by students and original one-act plays presented by the Theatre Arts Council (TAC-e). Workshops were presented by Theatre Arts faculty, affiliated artists, and Penn students. The festival ran from January 26th through February 22nd. Here is what the Director of Theatre, Brooke O’Harra, and the student co-producer of the festival, Molly McCaffrey had to say about this first iteration of what may very well turn into a staple midwinter event.

How did this festival come to be?

Brooke O’Harra: One of the things I think our Theatre program should do is make itself accessible to everybody. Something I’ve been addressing, since I’ve recently become the director of Theatre Arts at Penn, is the complicated issue of space resources on campus. The Theatre Arts program has access to classrooms and to a theater (for three months a year) because the SAS has a rental  agreement with PLA. Many people on campus are looking for space to make performance or to host performance events for their classes. Performance practice intersects with many fields of study, so faculty across SAS would like to make something on the stage or collaborate to sow work. So, when we came in, the program had a theater time slot on our schedule and that we’ve used for different things – but was not assigned to event during the season. I thought—let’s use that slot, that month of space in one of the Montgomery Theatre and use our classrooms to start to share the spaces and our resources with other potential collaborators across campus. There is a pretty big contingent of people who are desperate for space, including MFA students who also have ideas and want to try in theatrical spaces. We also have a huge prop and costume shop that is under-utilized.

The question became, how do we—as quickly as possible—get people into our spaces, introduced to us, into our prop closet, our junk closet, give them a sense of our resources? We don’t have much money, but we do have this space, and we do have some tech support, and we do have props and costumes and furniture pieces and equipment. And, obviously, lights, video and sound. So, we proposed this performance festival, and then we had an open call for, well, anything.

And how did you get involved with producing it, Molly?

Molly McCaffrey: I’d had a directing class with Brooke, and then she became my advisor, so I had a conversation about doing a thesis project to complete my honors degree. I sat down with her, and then with Cat Johnson, one of the other faculty members that I’ve worked with. Originally, I talked about doing a design thesis. I love to sew (I’ve been sewing my entire life), and I also was interested in lighting design. I have done various things throughout my time at Penn in those two fields. But the thing that I’ve done the most is management—producing student shows and stage managing. I also hold an executive board position on the Performing Arts Council as the theater chair. So, the three of us came up with a thesis… of me producing. I was really excited about it.

The process was going to be very collaborative. The funding was coming from Theatre, and there would be other people in charge of helping to curate it, but I’d be heavily involved in all those meetings. All in all, it felt like a pretty morphable, manageable project to take on. Not to mention that I am a huge fan of the Philly Fringe Festival, and I was interested in getting into more of experimental theater and live arts, and how multidisciplinary arts can collaborate with each other. So, it checked all the boxes. It seemed like a perfect match, and it was.

Could you talk us through some of that process?

BO: We opened up the application, and I said let’s just keep pushing it, let’s make brochures, let’s walk around and talk to all the classes, let’s write to faculty in other programs. Twelve students applied, which for the first festival felt like a pretty good number of projects. There was a big dance troupe, a couple of comedians, a DJ who was making work with a video artist, and some MFA fine artists, a PhD student, and some undergrads—one student did this amazing one-person card trick performance inside of a monologue about a famous card cheat. Another student had been building an original one-person show in an independent study—so this was the perfect venue to premier that. The inclusion of the grad students was really positive. They were super excited about having access to new systems and audiences. One of them is now doing video for our Spring production. The Center for Experimental Ethnography and Fine Arts loaned us gear, and MFA students showed up to help us out when we didn’t know how to do certain camera related. I think the program now recognizes the benefits of the inclusion of the graduate student. We all learned something about how openness lifts up everything.

It was a fun festival. People showed up. We had a dance party after each night of the second weekend. We had snacks. We had workshops. It was a good start and a way to reintroduce the Theatre Arts program to the campus as a place that is open and collaborative. You don’t have to be a Theatre Arts major; you don’t even have to be an undergrad to be involved. There was a class of advanced technical theatre students who worked the festival. They were assigned certain days and projects, but once those students started showing up, they just kept coming back and helping more. They did their hours plus some. They kept returning for extra shifts and tasks offering, “I’ll be in your reading,” “I’ll dance in your thing,” “I’ll do the sound for this,” “I’ll come in late to do this,” “I’ll stay for this, too,”… It was great.

And how did it work for you?

MM: I’ve done a lot of extracurricular theater on campus, so I’ve helped organize and produce shows before, but not in this vein. I was really happy with the final product. We had seven undergrad performances, and then seven graduate. Each night of the festival kind of grew in audience, so I’d like to think kind of word of mouth spread about the work we were doing. One thing that Brooke said throughout the whole process—and that I think is true to what we were trying to do—is that our first instinct as producers should be to say yes, and then, how do we do that? So, while it was curated, it was very much like: what do students want to put on right now and how do we give them the resources to do that? And it was cool seeing that come together—because people did not necessarily come with rehearsed projects. Sometimes it was more just a proposal for what they wanted to do. So, a lot of what we originally saw in those applications morphed into something completely different by the end.

You know, Penn has over 70 performing arts groups, but our performing arts majors are quite smaller in comparison. It has always been kind of jarring to me to see the level of involvement in extracurriculars and the passion of students in various arts and realize that almost everyone is studying something different. I think the Theatre Arts program really found a special spot in this festival… because we were supporting and promoting the live arts in an educational way, but you didn’t have to be a major to be involved. There were no barriers of entry to participate in this festival. Anyone was welcome.

What’s next for you?

MM: I’m waiting to hear back from some internships and see what I end up doing this summer, but I think my end goal is to continue to produce and work within theater management. I learned a lot through this process, and it’s really shaped what I want to do post-grad.

And for the Theatre program?

BO: Well, I have this other fantasy.

I recently made a proposal to our staff and faculty asking if we could we consider changing a past practice of taking a few students to the Edinburgh Fringe (which has become a massively commercial event) and instead partner with the Trust for Mutual Understanding to hook us up with a smaller curated contemporary performance festival in Eastern Europe. In this scenario we would participate as festival guests—as scholars and students. The idea is to go during the summer and then come back and be in a fall class called Theatre and Performance Festival. This class would debrief from the summer festival and then spend all of September attending Philadelphia’s Fringe festival.

After attending and discussing the work in the two major festivals, students will make proposals for performances that they could make together or individually over the second half of the semester. Then they would work together to help facilitate each other in creating the performance. And then, in January their pieces would be shown the Out of the Dark festival. The last step is that the winter festival would be juried, and the winner would have their show produced in the next year’s Philly Fringe with some small support from the program.

So, the whole point is that we can… because of the incredible people in this university, and because we can draw on our shared resources and connections, we can grow our theatre, dance, and performance practices at Penn. I see the festival as a doorway. It’s a beginning. It signals to the community that we are open and ambitious and making things happen.

*This piece was compiled from two separate interviews and was edited for clarity and brevity.