It’s 2041, the U.S. has splintered, and a young woman who never expected to find herself in the middle of a resistance movement is about to walk into a protest she thinks she’s only there to record. That’s the world of The Ferment, a live audio drama from Alicia Grega of Common Play Factory, recorded in front of a Scranton Fringe audience with a full cast and audience members participating as extras.
You can catch it at the Electric City Trolley Museum on Thursday, October 8 at 6:00 PM, Friday, October 9 at 9:00 PM, or Saturday, October 10 at 2:30 PM or 7:00 PM. Ahead of that, we talked to Alicia, a real Scranton fringe OG, about homelessness, sound design, and the years she’s spent building the world this story lives in.
In your own words, what is your show about?
Despite the political backdrop, The Ferment is a story about young people struggling to protect their autonomy in a rapidly changing world while succumbing to love and other unexpected plans. Sonja shows up to a protest with a field recorder, telling herself she’s observing for a college project, not joining some resistance movement. By the end of the series she’s lost all objectivity and gotten in way over her head. Love will have this effect — even in the future!
Sonja would have been born in 2017 — the same time I conceived of this story world — so she’s about nine years old in 2026. My work as a college professor has given me a direct line to the hopes and fears of Gen Z and I’ve found their determination inspiring. It’s too soon to tell what Sonja’s generation will be like but I don’t expect them to lay down and give up their hopes of a viable future. I believe in them and that gives me the courage to face all these uncertainties in the present day.
What sparked this piece?
Two things collided, one much older than the other. I’ve been fixated on homelessness since a report in eighth grade and reading about Reagan closing psychiatric institutions in the 1980s. In 2017, I was in grad school for my MFA when I heard a conservative radio host on WILK seriously propose rounding up San Francisco’s homeless and shipping them off to camps. That’s where Comfort Station No. 8, the feature screenplay The Ferment is a prequel to, actually started: not as a screenplay idea first, but as a question about who will protect the most vulnerable, and how.
The other thing is sound itself. I’m sensitive to it; too many layers at once and I lose the thread entirely, the way some people describe visual clutter. Meanwhile, my visual imagination is so powerful that I’ll sometimes close my eyes during a TV show once I know the room and the people in it, because I don’t need to see it anymore. Audio is more intimate and it allows the listener to assemble their own pictures.
I went through nearly every scripted fiction podcast Audible had before I canceled that subscription for Libro.fm, which routes the same money through local bookstores instead. During a few sadly isolated years, podcasts like Marc Maron’s WTF provided a real sense of companionship. So when I needed a format I could actually afford to produce myself, next to a feature screenplay I couldn’t, making Sonja’s backstory a limited podcast series was an obvious path.
The Ferment is set about fifteen years from now; ComStat8 checks back in on some of the same people roughly a decade after that. How and why does Sonja become a social worker working from within ComStat8 despite awareness of corruption? The Ferment answers that.
What does “Fringe” mean to you as an artist?
My play Banger’s Elixir was part of the first Scranton Fringe Festival back in 2015, and I’ve been part of at least five Fringe productions since, plus more than I can count from the audience. Common Play Factory started around the same time as Fringe, not long after I left the Jason Miller Playwrights’ Project at Scranton Public Theatre, where we spent five years developing new work by NEPA writers.
Every theater, everywhere in the country struggles to draw an audience — we’ve all played to a handful of familiar faces. The only way I know to grow audience is to give people an experience they can’t get anywhere else, right here in their own community, that reminds them they’re alive and that they still have agency in the world. We have to make our own power and empower each other in the process.
That’s a big part of what Fringe means to me: it’s one of the last spaces built entirely around freedom of expression and experimenting with new forms — which matters for a show that’s partly about freedom of speech at a moment when that freedom is genuinely under threat.
This is also the first time I’ve brought my own writing to a live audience since finishing my MFA in 2019 — the pandemic and an overload of teaching jobs got in the way longer than I liked. A live audio drama, with the audience split into witnesses and participants in a fictional protest, is a strange ask for a festival slot. Fringe is an environment I can trust to hold space for a vulnerable work in progress.
What do you want someone to feel — or think about differently — after seeing your show?
I’d like them to sit with how ordinary the road into a bad system usually looks from the inside. Nobody in this story thinks of themselves as the villain, including the people who become one. If someone leaves turning that over — a decision they’ve made in their own life to trust an institution, or not to, and why — that’s the whole ask. I’m not handing anyone a conclusion. I don’t fully have one myself. It’s all changing too quickly and adaptation requires flexibility.
What’s been the hardest or most surprising part of making this?
The writing was the easy part, and it was solo — just me, for a long time. Getting the show off the page takes a room full of people willing to believe in something that doesn’t exist yet, based on nothing but a script and my word for it. That’s always been true of theater, but it feels like a harder ask right now than it used to. People are stretched thinner, more careful with their time, more skeptical that showing up for something new and unproven is worth it.
Every person who’s said yes to this — cast, crew, a sound designer building rehearsal cues out of stage directions before we’d even finished hiring, everyone who’s shown up to a table read for a show that doesn’t exist as audio yet — did it on trust alone. That’s the part that still chokes me up: The Ferment is happening because people I mostly hadn’t worked with before agreed to bet on a couple of scripts. And I genuinely believe in the power of art to bring people together and change the world.
We’re splitting the room — “witnesses” on one side, “actors” on the other who will participate in our fictional protest; chanting, standing in a crowd that’s about to be met with fictional, but audible, force. Neither choice is wrong. What I hope people carry out of making that choice is the same question the show keeps circling back to: what’s our responsibility as citizens in a country where those freedoms are genuinely at risk. We have power. We have voices. The only real question is whether we’re using them to their full potential.
Anything else you want people to know before they walk in?
Common Play Factory exists to make room for new, original, experimental work — the stuff without a template yet — and everyone who has backed that, with money, time, or just showing up to something untested, has my gratitude, full stop.
A live audio drama isn’t a familiar shape for a festival show. If you’re curious rather than certain, that’s the right way to walk in. Come skeptical if you want. Just come.
Catch The Ferment at the Electric City Trolley Museum on Thursday, October 8 at 6:00 PM, Friday, October 9 at 9:00 PM, or Saturday, October 10 at 2:30 PM or 7:00 PM, as part of the 2026 Scranton Fringe Festival. Buy tickets here. Our thanks to Alicia for enlightening us with the story behind the story, both of the show and her journey as a local NEPA writer (our favorite kind).
