” I’ve gotten so much better at embracing that uncertainty, and it’s a really fun and freeing attitude to take.”

After you graduate from Wesleyan, you can go the usual route and become a lawyer or a doctor or a barista or whatever. Alternatively, you can join a nomadic street theater troupe and live out of a bus for four months. For now, Emily Caffery ’10 is choosing the latter. She and four other actors, collectively known as The Vagari Project, have been making their way down the East Coast since September, performing on street corners, in parks, and at farmers’ markets along the way. The troupe will be passing through Wesleyan tomorrow, so if you see a group of strangely-dressed individuals making wild gestures outside Usdan, don’t be alarmed. Or be as alarmed as you want; as Caffery notes, the group never knows what kind of audience it’s going to get.

The Vagari Project is the brainchild of Hampshire theater student Forrest Hejkal, who writes in his mission statement that he hopes to experiment with breaking the conventional performer-audience model of theater. The performances are “short comedies mainly in the style of commedia dell’arte, the tradition of street performers of the Italian and French Renaissance (think masks, outlandish characters, and slapstick humor).”

I didn’t get a chance to talk with Caffery in person, but she happily answered my questions by email about what it’s been like on the road (specifically in this awesome bus), her theater experience at Wesleyan, and how she got involved with the project. Read more after the jump.