Philly Fringe 2026: FringeArts presents Ontroerend Goed’s Handle with Care

Handle with Care begins when the audience is brought to a room containing only an eponymously labeled box on the stage. If an audience member opens the box, participants discover a series of instructions, messages, and equipment through which they will become the artists and observers of their own performance. Like a board game, this box includes rules, randomly assigned roles, and a series of instructions that provide a general progression of “scenes” for the performance. However, those instructions also encourage participants to not fret about executing the prompts perfectly, but rather celebrate their unique experience of the performance, however it happens.

Questions of execution

Creators Ontroerend Goed (a pun on “real estate” roughly translated as “feel estate”) have received international acclaim for their innovative interactive performances since 2007. Handle with Care has toured the international festival circuit with performances across Europe, North America, and Asia since 2025. In this year’s Philly Fringe, it's one of only seven international works out of 236 shows in the festival, and the sole international piece of this year’s Curated Fringe.

Yet as a Curated show (presumably brought to Philly and managed on-site by FringeArts) it’s difficult to tell which aspects of Handle with Care we should attribute to FringeArts, and which to Ontroerend Goed. The performance I attended had close to 50 participants, but the piece often felt as if it might have been best enjoyed in a smaller group. Seats were arranged in rows facing a raised stage in a large, echo-y room—an odd choice for an audience-driven, collaborative experience. Arranging seats in a circle around a flat, open stage area in the center might have better allowed for participant interaction while also removing an obstacle for audience members with limited mobility to enter the playing space.

A light touch from afar

The experience is overall a positive one, largely due to the creators’ light touch, which allows the performance to feel balanced and thought-provoking amid so much open-endedness. Themes of care, presence, and togetherness weave throughout but never grow overly saccharine. Participants are prompted to notice, connect, and attend to one another through group and individual activities, without evoking workplace icebreakers.

The box's rules clearly present helpfulness and consent as core tenets of the experience, an ethos the audience was quick to enact at the performance I attended. Messages of praise and encouragement appear frequently, both in letters from the artist and in prompts to participants to say “good job!” or give each other stickers.

Connection across time and place

The box’s materials also inspire connection across place and time through the time-capsule-like inclusion of materials from previous performances of Handle with Care, an inclusion that allows participants to see other shapes the performance might take. Audience members are encouraged to think of themselves as a collective, even marking on a calendar when the group might next meet again.

An element toward the end of the experience contained a voice message from the artist congratulating the participants on our performance. Despite having been recorded in Ghent in 2024, the message managed to feel so intimate that, when the artist in the recording began clapping for us, the audience slowly started clapping with her in solidarity, so that one among us might not be left out.

At top: A ‘Handle with Care’ performance arrives in boxes. (Photo by Joëlle Desmet.)

Our Fringe Coverage Friends Drive donors made this review possible. Be sure to subscribe so you can stay in the conversation! If you want to join our supporters, you can make a gift here.