A Paly theater group will travel to Scotland to attend and perform in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the first time from Aug. 4-17.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, commonly known as The Fringe, is an annual event in Edinburgh, Scotland. According to The Fringe Web site, the event is the largest performing arts festival in the world with thousands of diverse performers ranging from professional actors to street performers. All performing art forms are present including theater, dance, physical theatre, exhibitions, and all genres of music.

Senior Tom Marks attended The Fringe with his family during the summer of 2007 and is very excited to go a second time.

“The Fringe is everything you can imagine; it’s performance,” Marks said. “There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of plays there. It’s kind of a theater geek’s dream in the sense that you are there for a week watching many plays a day. You live and breath theater while you are there.”

Each year, schools from around the United States are nominated to the American High School Theater Festival. Then, each nominated school fills out an application and approximately 50 high schools are selected each year to participate in The Fringe. Paly was notified in April 2008 that it was chosen. Since then, a dedicated group of 35 Paly students have been preparing for the festival.

“The Fringe is just remarkable,” theater teacher Kathleen Woods said. “The audience is from the entire world, and the students will have the opportunity to perform on a worldwide stage.”

The musical that Paly Theater students will perform at the festival is called “Young Americans.” It focuses on the role of music in teenagers’ lives every decade since the 1950s. Although the dialogue and the music is mostly student-written, professional Prince Gomolvilas has been working with the students on it.

“The play is entirely student-written, but we couldn’t do this without Prince,” Marks said. “He helps organize everything and makes sure that we can get the best out of what we can do.”

The students will perform “Young Americans” in Palo Alto on May 16, 22, and 23 before traveling to the festival. The money made from these send-off performances will go to expenses for the trip. According to Woods, even though the students will have the proceeds from the send-off performances and from many other fundraising events, most families will have to pay the majority of the trip’s cost, as most of the fundraising to date has gone to production costs.

“The fundraising so far has been really successful, but it is such an expensive process,” Marks said. “It costs about $20,000 for production costs alone. Then there is the individual cost for each student. Normally, we would also have to raise scholarship money, but an anonymous donor donated all the money for scholarships.”

Fundraising efforts so far include selling concessions at Stanford sporting events, an alumni letter writing campaign, a craft sale, Halloween costume rentals, and a coupon book sale. Proceeds from Paly’s Play in a Day, which will be performed on March 21, will also help cover costs for the trip.

Before attending the festival in Scotland, the students will be in London for a few days where they hope to see some shows and go sightseeing. When the students are not performing at, rehearsing for, or watching performances at The Fringe in Scotland, they will take tours, visit castles and the countryside, go sightseeing, and shop.