This blog post is by Emily Schweich, junior broadcast journalism major.

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Fun, quirky and genre-based – that’s the kind of theatre that inspires Jason Schlafstein.

He often saw it at the Capital Fringe Festival, but “it didn’t seem like year-round theatres were doing theatre that had that kind of spirit all year,” he said.

So Schlafstein, a University of Maryland School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) alumnus who received his B.A. in Theatre Performance in 2008, joined with Colin Grube to found Flying V Theatre in 2010. The company was recently named the 2015 John Aniello Outstanding Emerging Theatre Company by theatreWashington and the Helen Hayes Awards.

The UMD family is a really strong one,” Schlafstein said. “I’ve never seen in this town a group of alumni who are so invested and supportive in working with one another.”