Philly Fringe 2026: Cannonball presents Suz Evans’s Ghost Fetus

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much the idea here. Written by Suz Evans and directed by Anna Klos, and performed by the Chicago-based collective Sweet Sorry Meat, Ghost Fetus is one of the more baffling, what the fuck did we just watch Fringe shows I’ve seen in recent memory. The musical—oh, yeah, it’s also a musical—follows two queer teenagers (Lolo Ramos and Jacqui Touchet) as they wrestle with their faith and sexuality against the backdrop of their fundamentalist Christian church, eventually seeking guidance from their closeted pastor (Brenden Zwiebel) and his friend/secret lover (Gus Thomas). All the while, the ghost fetus (Tia Pinson), wrapped in a frilly umbilical cord, emerges from a giant basket and prowls the theater, lambasting the evils of abortion and homosexuality.

A deadly-straight satire?

A generous read of what Ghost Fetus is trying to do is a deadly-straight satire of a hypothetical right-wing abortion show. What if you took a Daily Wire-produced musical about the sins of abortion and homosexuality and executed it to its logical extreme, playing it so genuinely as to reveal the inherent absurdities of such a project?

You can’t deny that it’s a risky swing, but it requires more tact than this to connect. The show launches into its provocations in wild, frenetic stabs, landing with all the sweaty consideration of a teenage edgelord. Its incitements—simulated fellatio, masturbation, the use of the f-slur, harangues that are alternately pro-life and anti-queer—aren’t given the space to gradually build or crest, and instead amass in a continual nonsensical drone.

It feels unfair to invoke Lightning Rod Special’s The Appointment—also a recent musical that satirizes the abortion debate, and one of the finest pieces of theater I’ve seen (here’s a BSR review)—but it’s a perfect example of how to make something like this work. Great incendiary art takes care to identify the line that’s being crossed, but here, the play has little sense of when or why it’s transgressing. The audience leaves not in shock but in bewilderment.

A series of naughty words

Texturally, the show evokes the color and melodrama of high-school theater, sometimes intentionally but often to its detriment. The performances—broadly emotive, wide-eyed and gesticular—work as parodies of student acting, but fail to stir anything resembling real emotion. The songs are serviceable if stylistically bland, particularly underwhelming for their tinny vocals. Klos’s staging strews actors about the stage, straining for a false sense of energy and resulting in unfocused compositions. Occasionally, the sound and light will coalesce into a nicely slasher-tinged atmosphere—bright neons accompanied by a synthy 1980s John Carpenter score—and you get a glimpse of what might have been.

By the end of its short 45-minute runtime, the play feels less like a story and more like an excuse to shout a series of naughty words, strung together on a threadbare plot. I’m not immune to such mischievous pleasures—and they can certainly be amusing in their own patchwork, Fringe-y way—but it’s all hollow shock absent a stronger sense of clarity, of moral purpose. You need teeth for your satire to bite.