Two Oswego State theater majors performed their original stage production at the Rochester Fringe Festival on Sept. 20 and 21.

Oswego seniors Michaela Buckley and Sean Ryan created their show and production company, “Good Friends Bad Company,” for the sole purpose of performing at this year’s Rochester Fringe Festival. The show “Between Fourth and Fifth,” is about two strangers who become stuck in an elevator between the titular floors of a building and explores the nature of human interaction and social struggles of young Americans while the two characters are trapped together.

“It was kind of our summer project. We saw that Fringe Festival was looking for submissions, so we were just like, ‘why not see if we could put up a show?’” Buckley said. “We applied to a bunch of different [theaters] and we were actually chosen as 17 out of 127 applicants that applied to the Avyarium, which was the theater that took our show.”

The pair created the show over the summer after their application was selected at the end of spring. In about four months, between May and September, Buckley and Ryan took the brief description of their show they put on their application and turned it into a play. 

“It was a really cool blend, her and I work very differently but very similarly at the same time. Her and I have very different background in theater,” Ryan said. “It was a really cool hybrid of production.”

Their process, they said, was to make the show “a slice of life” and capture the authenticity of two strangers forced together. To get that level of authenticity, Ryan and Buckley spent a lot of time in an elevator and based their characters partly on themselves.

“I feel like my character was a lot more pessimistic than I would be, but I feel like there were moments that were ‘us,’ fully through and through,” Ryan said. “But also, just kind of, you’re human. Less an individual [experience] and more a human experience.”

For Buckley, who grew up in Fairport, New York, just outside of Rochester, the chance to attend the Rochester Fringe Festival was exciting.

“I had a great time. We are the city of festivals, when there is a festival going on, everyone is so happy to be a Rochestarian, we’re all out there having a good time,” Buckley said.

Ryan, as a Buffalo native, felt welcome in the tight-knit Rochester theater community.

“As a [visitor], it was truly amazing the amount of work and love that went into this festival. So many people had so much passion about it,” Ryan said. “Just going out to the bars after the performance, you would hear people talking about it and they’d go ‘Oh you were in a Fringe show? That’s so cool we love Fringe,” or even Uber drivers would be like ‘oh so did you guys go to a Fringe show tonight?’ and it was just a really cool experience. It was an amazing community coming together, truly.”

The experience of producing and performing a show in a festival felt “unreal” to Ryan and Buckley at first, until it hit them after their shows.

“We did that, we’re doing this. This is actually happening. It was just unreal,” Ryan said. “To fully invest just yourselves into something and create your own work and feel this overwhelming sense of pride. It’s weird you don’t want to be self-consumed and have a huge ego, but it was definitely one of those moments of pure pride.”

While Buckley and Ryan are seniors, they have not thought too much about life after graduation. They are grateful of their time at Oswego State and the opportunity to perform at Oswego and the Rochester Fringe Festival.

“Here we go! We did this now, so what can we accomplish in the future?” Buckley said. “Knowing we’re able to do this here and now? Kick down doors, let’s do this.”

Photo provided by Michaela Buckley