It all started with a single, simple story. As a child, Grace Fruauff ’26 spent hours with her sisters spinning “drama and suspense and murder and romance” stories. Using their dolls and a single playset, she never realized that her toys would become inspiration for a life in theatre. “It’s something I’ve always gravitated toward,” she said, looking back at the earliest sparks of her artistic journey.
Today, Grace works as a playwright, director, and actor, fluctuating between the three. To understand how she arrived at her current versatility, it helps to look back at where she began. Her Theatre 101 came via performance. “I started off as an actor,” she explains. That early training gave her the firsthand experience of being in a production, which guided her to become an approachable director. “To be a good director, you have to know how to act — not to be good or bad at it, but to understand the communication style and how actors process things.” Directing, in turn, helped her find her own style, characters, story, and world she wants to create. Together, these experiences form a tangible, creative vision that shapes everything she creates.
With that, the next stage emerged: her blossoming experimental spirit. “I enjoy pushing the bounds of the medium itself and seeing what I can get away with,” she says. She draws inspiration from avant-garde figures like Antonin Artaud, embracing risk and the thrill of doing something new. “It’s more satisfying when you do something new and it works than when you use the same [approach].”
Grace’s work thrives on experimentation. Her current playwriting thesis shows just how far she’ll push the boundaries of radical play. “There’s no set of rules,” she explains. “There’s no one way to do it. You can [approach theatre] however you want, which I really enjoy.” Inspired by Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada’s fluid characters and time, she has crafted a story about a tight-knit boy-band fan club rocked by scandal. When a criminal allegation threatens their idols, fans rally to prove the band’s innocence, uncovering shifting relationships and surprising truths along the way. “It’s about how community gets defined, how those boundaries shift,” she says. When asked for the recurring theme in her work, she answers, “Loneliness is a big one that I deal with. Loneliness is what brings these girls together.”
However, the creative process wasn’t always easy. “This summer, when I was writing the play, it was difficult to just start. I had to do a lot of [unrelated] writing to figure out what I wanted,” she recalls. “My advisor really helped me. She would give me exercises and due dates. If I turned in something that was four pages, she’d say, ‘Okay, now give me something that’s like ten pages,’ to keep pushing against the desire to pull back.” Those incremental challenges transformed early uncertainty into steady progress, eventually revealing her story’s core.
For her, theatre is the most freeing medium: “It can’t really be easily defined by one thing. You can do it however you want — without dialogue, without stage directions, or whatever comes to mind. As long as it’s worth exploring to you.” That openness shapes her artistic aesthetic and approach to pushing the boundaries of theatre — time, space, and character warp in unexpected ways.
That same openness carries through when she discusses audience reactions to her work. She answers with a broad and relieved smile: “As long as they get something out of it, even if it’s not what I intend, I’m happy,” she says. “The words might not be universal, but the emotion is.”
For her, that emotional resonance is the artist’s true social role: to listen, reflect, and reveal. “Artists are the listeners of society,” she believes. “They reflect back what’s going on so people can see it. And maybe change.” It’s what fuels her dedication to creating.
As our conversation winds down, Grace offers a parting message she carries close to her heart. “There have been moments in my life when I thought that I shouldn’t be going down this path because of what other people said. But what they think is not important.” For Grace, creating art is an act of self-preservation as much as expression. “A big part is being able to create your own art, because there’s no one else who can create it for you. So if you stop making art, then your message won’t be in the world.”
“If that’s something really important to you, you should keep going and make sure your message is heard.”
Catch Grace’s playwriting thesis showcase on Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. in the Frear Ensemble Theater to experience firsthand her boundless storytelling. Beginning with a childhood dollhouse, now, her work lights up the stage.
