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On Stage: Fringe & Newman

The Fringe Festival began in Scotland as a reaction to commercial theatre; small outlying theatre groups that were not accepted for a festival decided to perform anyway, at the edges of the festival, thus earning the name “fringe.” While the concept has come to describe increasingly various types of performance art, two characteristics remain: affordability and originality. The Wichita Fringe Festival is a day-long event that features short original scripts written and performed by high school students from schools around the city. It is a family-friendly event, and you can catch it onstage at Fisch Haus on Saturday, March 10th, with the program beginning at 10 am, followed by a Q&A with the playwrights; the program is repeated at 1 pm, but without a Q&A.

The Dog in the Manger is onstage at Newman University. Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, sometimes referred to as the “Spanish Shakespeare,”  wrote the comedy in the early 1600s as an adaptation of a Spanish version of the proverbial dog in the manger. De Vega uses the old adage to contemplate class issues: in his play, the prideful countess Diana refuses the advances of suitable suitors of her class, and finds that she has fallen in love with her secretary, who is also her maid's lover. The countess is too jealous to allow the couple to marry, and too haughty to marry the secretary herself.  You can see The Dog in the Manger on March 1st to the 4th at De Mattias Performance Hall, Newman University.

Sanda Moore Coleman received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University in 1991. Since then, she has been the arts and community editor for The Martha's Vineyard Times, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and an assistant editor at Image. In 2011, she received the Maureen Egan Writers Exchange prize for fiction from Poets & Writers magazine. She has spent more than 30 years performing, reviewing, and writing for theatre.