In these turbulent times, artists in the Fringe Festival are using their mediums to present worst case scenarios for our unpredictable future. Check out the horrifying projections of reality coming to our city at this year’s Fringe!

AMERICANA PSYCHOBABBLE @ Berks Warehouse
Alexandra Tatarsky

A delirious anti-narrative of American emptiness, violence, and nonsense—part exorcism and part enema! With styrofoam wings, Xmas lights, and ketchup. “Phyllis Diller meets Artaud!” “Like Kellyanne Conway woke up from a coma after overdosing on sleeping pills and reading too much Gertrude Stein.” AMERICANA PSYCHOBABBLE exists somewhere between irrational healing ceremony, sad clown song, dance in the abyss, and desperate diatribe to take back ecstatic nonsense as an act of resistance. More info and tickets here.

Every Day APOCALYPSE! @ The Collective
Lone Brick Theatre Company

The death rays and nukes of outrageous fortune are aimed squarely at a struggling theater group when an irate son of God condemns the company to face a new apocalyptic scenario every day, for eternity. Can they learn to get along in order to save the world, not to mention the world’s worst production of Hamlet? More info and tickets here.

GATZ @ Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre
Harrison Stengle

Philadelphia, year 2025, the tempo of the city had changed sharply. The buildings were higher, the parties were bigger, the morals were looser and the kush was cheaper, the restlessness approached hysteria. From the makers of the off-off Broadway show Sword of the Unicorn comes GATZ a Great Gatsby modernist parody. More info and tickets here.

Hello Blackout! @ The Proscenium Theatre at the Drake
New Paradise Laboratories

Family life before the Big Bang.

New Paradise Laboratories provides a fresh take on the creation myth, infusing it with playful nonsense in an impossible setting—before, during and after the Big Bang. A horror-farce with philosophical overtones, Hello Blackout! follows the eccentric Kissimmees—triplets, their mother, an elusive father—at the beginning of time. Blackouts engulf the family as they slam into the inexplicable future—with grim and hilarious results.
“Dazzling! Nothing less than a theatrical meditation on the mysterious and dangerous universe human beings inhabit.” The Philadelphia Inquirer
More info and tickets here.

An Incomplete List of All the Things I’m Going to Miss When the World is No Longer @ Gershman Hall, The University of the Arts
Dante Green

You’re invited to the last sh*t show of the year, to revel in the deaths, divorces, deception and the miserable isolation of life. We’ve all been through some stuff and thrown some parties, and it just seems fitting to go out with a bang. There will be drugs. (In rep with SIMONE RPT8) More info and tickets here.

A Period of Animate Existence @ Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Pig Iron Theatre Company

Children, elders, and machines contemplate the future in a time of dire predictions and rapid technological change in this work of symphonic theater conceived by composer/filmmaker Troy Herion, scenic designer Mimi Lien, and director Dan Rothenberg.
How do we contemplate the future in such a perilous time, an era called the “Sixth Extinction,” when up to 50 percent of all living species might die off? An inspired, large-scale melding of music, design, and theater, A Period of Animate Existence investigates the intense, unnamable emotions that arise in a time of extinction. More info and tickets here.

Scattershot @ Franky Bradley’s
Poison Apple Initiative

As violence rages outside in the streets, four women sit in a waiting room preparing for a very particular test. A dark comedy about hierarchy, inevitability, and animal instinct. A new play by Bastion Carboni. More info and tickets here.

Simone R.P.T. 8 @ Gershman Hall, The University of the Arts
Lyell Hintz

Imagine emerging from a virtual upbringing designed to instill specific qualities within a ‘perfect’ personality. Simone R.P.T. 8 follows Simone as she is prepped to have her personality extracted for mass consumption, within a world that normalizes genetic modification. In rep with An Incomplete List. More info and tickets here.

Splintered Glass @ The Performance Garage
Courtney Hunter and Guest Artists

Splintered Glass explores the human desire to understand what lies beyond the surface of reality as we know it. It examines the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, challenges the apparent facades of our world and brings iconic Philadelphia sculptures to life. Everything we think we see has something more beyond it . . . will you take a look? More info and tickets here.