The BSR editor’s picks for the 2025 Philadelphia Fringe Festival

I’ve been attending the Philly Fringe for 21 years. Coverage of the festival is one of the biggest projects our editorial team tackles each year, and you can’t do it well from behind a desk. That’s why, in addition to assigning coverage, editing dozens of reviews, and writing a few of my own, I see as many shows as I can.

Here are some I have my eye on this year. Use it as a jumping-off point for your own schedule, or get inspired to investigate other shows. And if you want to follow this year’s theme of shows by disabled and chronically ill artists, check out my “radical act” roundup.

Lions
By Lightning Rod Special
September 10-21 at the Proscenium at the Drake (wheelchair-accessible)

For years, I’ve seen everything LRS develops. The company’s shows are often timely, if not prescient, and when they don’t quite come together, I still admire their distinctive and ambitious voice. This year’s show, Lions, is written and performed by Alice Yorke and Scott R. Sheppard, and directed by Sarah Blush. It’s “an unsentimental two-hander about the business of letting our dads die. With a dose of Kafka and A Christmas Carol, Lions disassembles the myths our fathers told themselves about what it means to be a good man.” Look out for the BSR review.

Read our past coverage and decide for yourself:
2019’s The Appointment
2022’s Speech
2024’s Nosejob

Caribbean King
By AZ Espinoza
September 14-25 at the Proscenium at the Drake (wheelchair-accessible)

AZ Espinoza is another Philly playwright/actor to watch. Their new show is “a de-colonial, trans-gressive, adaptive confrontation with Shakespeare’s King Lear,” set on an island resort in the path of a catastrophic hurricane and a hotelier father who will not accept that he has a son, not a daughter. The show puts “Black, Queer, Diasporic liberation at the eye of its storm.” Look out for a review by Krista Mar.

Past coverage:
2023’s All My Mothers Dream in Spanish

Ben Franklin Sex Party
By Sarah Knittel
September 12-20 at Pig Iron Theater Company

I first saw BFSP in the 2019 Free Fringe. It was brash, funny, and uncomfortable. Now Knittel is bringing back this “time traveling romp of a clown piece about pleasure, shame, giving up on America, and a syphilis epidemic.” The 2019 show had pepperoni nipples, a recorder recital, and a chair snafu. I have high hopes for this year. Want more from Knittel? She’s a BSR writer, too. Look out for her Dungeon Master guide to this year’s clown shows.

Past coverage:
2018’s Nightmare Fuel
2020’s Shitty Jews

The Presented
By Chris Davis
September 6-28 at Studio 34

Chris Davis is another artist I rarely miss. His solo shows combine deep vulnerability, thoughtful physicality, and creative, often-hilarious story-telling. Davis debuted The Presented in 2018, and now that “the Golden Age of Theater has ended: grants canceled, theaters shuttered, universities gone bankrupt,” he’s revisiting his show about what it means for an artist to be “chosen,” updated for 2025. I’m going to catch a trolley to the West Philly Fringe hub hosting this show, and even with the frustrations of the slashed SEPTA service now in effect, I bet it’ll be worth it. Look out for a review from Alix Rosenfeld.

Past coverage:
2024’s The 40-Year-Old Ballerino
2024’s One-Man Nutcracker

New adventures

I’m also heading to plenty of shows from artists I don’t know as well. Here’s a selection.

Etiquette
By David Lee White, presented by Pier Players Theatre Company
September 5-14 at the Adrienne Theatre (wheelchair-accessible)

Pier Players are new-ish on the Philly scene and I’ve been wanting to check them out myself. Here’s a great chance. This show set in 2021 sounds like a satire of the contemporary theater world. Charlotte Northeast directs.

Past coverage:
2024’s The Angry Grammarian

Kaidan: Night of 100 Spirits
By Schreiben, the Conjurer
September 5-7 at Plays & Players

A multi-media stage show combining ghostly Japanese folklore and Victorian spiritualism. I love ghost stories and cultural exploration, so this sounds fun.

Pennsylvania Semiconscious Liberation Army
By Nick Gillette
September 5-28 at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake (wheelchair-accessible)

Nick is a friend and former coworker of mine and I have enjoyed catching his work over the years. It always pushes the envelope and imagines new theatrical forms. Billed as “part leftist struggle session, part trolley problem, part sacralized communal dance,” this show engages the audience in ethical dilemmas.

Galatea
By Lizzy Arnold
September 19-21 at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake (wheelchair-accessible)

This show caught my eye because I loved novelist Madeline Miller’s short work by the same name, imagining the story of Pygmalion from the point of view of the statue. I’m interested in the themes of gendered imprisonment and agency the show offers.

BIPOC Improv House Team
By Sawubona Creativity Project’s BIPOC House Team
September 17-21 at Sawubona Creativity Project

Ok, yes, I don’t take in a lot of sketch or improv. It’s just not my jam. But in the spirit of staying open to all art forms, and supporting marginalized artists in a predominantly white performance world, I’m heading to this show, conveniently happening just a few blocks from home in East Passyunk, where “every performer brings their unique lived experience, cultural perspective, and comedic voice to the mix.” Sawubona Creativity Project, founded by Tanya Morgan, seems to be developing into a year-round hub for interdisciplinary performance, and I want to look in.

Ethiopian Dreams
By Circus Abyssinia
September 15-22 at Icebox Project Space (wheelchair-accessible)

Circus arts are still looming large on our theater scene, and this sounds like a very cool chance to check out some artists promising “dazzling acrobatics, gravity-defying stunts, and joyful live music” while I learn about Ethiopian culture.

The Boo Hag
By Hoodoo Technique
September 21-24 at Icebox Project Space (wheelchair-accessible)

Another chance to dive into a culture that’s new to me. This multidisciplinary narrative performance set in 1965 is adapted from South Carolina’s Gullah Geechee folklore of the Boo Hag, “an evil spirit that seeks to get into your home to drink your soul.”

Is That Right?!
By Dr. Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey and Cara Hammer
September 5-26 at ComedySportz Philadelphia (wheelchair-accessible)

Another improv show sucking me in. Someone I know recently shared a meme claiming that the appendix contains more neurons than the spinal cord. We seem to have arrived at a total societal collapse of our ability to evaluate scientific claims, so I’m interested in this show that forces improv comedians to explain new scientific research on the spot to the actual scientist.

Changing My Major to Joan
By Boris Dansberry
September 18-27 at the Asian Arts Initiative Storefront (wheelchair-accessible)

This show invites us to “Join Boris and the spirit of Joan of Arc in the trans medieval Powerpoint concert you never knew you needed.” Large factions of America are trying to erase trans history, trans rights, and therefore trans futures. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re supporting trans artists.

Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People
By Rhonda Moore + Ben Grinberg/Almanac Projects
September 23-27 at the Louis Bluver Theatre at the Drake (wheelchair accessible.)

I've been catching Almanac shows for years. They tend to combine strange stories with movement that is as acrobatic as it is tender and vulnerable. This show, developed between a 69-year-old Black woman and a 35-year-old queer Jewish man, is inspired by a 1901 self-help book for the industrial age, and explores how "'strength and health' is often more about an image than a habit or a feeling."

Past coverage:
2019's xoxo moongirl
2022's I Hear You and I'd Like to Respond