The Freedom of Fringe
To create theatre, you must have access to two fundamental elements: a place to perform and an audience to perform for. The vast majority of art and live theatre in this country is commodified because of a lack of community support or the force of government pushback, so established theaters simply cannot take the financial risk of giving budding artists and new works access to their space and audience without charging prices out of an artist’s range. The emergence of fringe theatre festivals has largely filled this need by providing an unjuried, uncensored, equally accessible playing space to celebrate and exchange new works of performing arts at a relentless rate; they are open-access performing arts festivals that produce a variety of different live performances.
As an acting and directing major, I became interested in pursuing research on fringe theatre when my mentor, David Kaye, suggested it as a potential topic. With no previous experience at fringe festivals, I was interested in the prospect of spending time immersed in new cities and new theatre, as well as taking on a project with a camera. So, with funding from a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), I aimed to create a documentary defining fringe theatre and identifying why it is important. To do this, I embedded myself in two distinctly different fringe festivals over the course of two and a half weeks. My goal was to create a series of primary resources about fringe, of which there are few publicly accessible. Additionally, I wanted to provide a resource for fringe festivals themselves to use as advertising, and to provide more insight into their role in the artistic community. This project offered an opportunity for me to get feet-on-the-ground experience in working on a large-scale project, wearing all hats of a film production team, and trying my hand at documentary filmmaking.
A Brief History of Fringe
While fringe produces new works, fringe itself dates back to 1947, when eight theatre troupes were excluded from the Edinburgh International Festival for “lacking the culture for an international audience.” These troupes turned on their heels and boldly performed their pieces at various venues on the fringes of the festival, free of charge to anyone who wanted to attend, and free of charge to anyone who wanted to perform as well. The term fringe came to be widely used by the 1950s as swarms of performers, writers, and artists returned year after year and, eventually, created the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, which fostered an open forum of artistic expression and reduced financial risks for audiences and artists (edfringe.com).
Fringe was spreading throughout the UK like wildfire, with performances taking place in studios, repertory theatres, storage rooms of pubs, and even the odd garage. By the 1970s, established fringes gained their own spaces and developed their own niches, providing stages for a wide range of works to be shown that may not have played at a larger venue (Stanton and Banham, 129). Fringe didn’t just hop a flight to North America, though—Edmonton Fringe in Canada was the first North American fringe festival, its
founder having taken inspiration from Edinburgh. They were the first fringe that didn’t have a centralized box office, instead opting to sell tickets directly through the artists and theatres. This began to pen the characteristic of fringe being open and accessible to all artists, and proved theatre can be produced anywhere, sparking inspiration in cities across the US (Batchelder).
The first North American Fringe began in Edmonton, Alberta, modeling itself after the original Edinburgh Fringe, and became a founding member of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (Fringe Theatre Edmonton). Today, while Edmonton still holds the record for most popular North American fringe, twenty-seven fringe festivals from California to Maine are members of the U.S. Association of Fringe Festivals, though this number does not account for any independently operating fringes.
From Maine to California
A mural on the wall of the Hollywood Fringe Headquarters that also served as a stage for fringe cabaret performances.
I stayed in Hollywood, California, for six days while attending the Hollywood Fringe Festival, which hosted 416 shows at twenty-seven separate venues, totaling more than 2,000 performances over the course of eleven days. I am fortunate to have extended family in Pasadena, which is only a short twenty-five-minute drive from any of the Hollywood Fringe venues. At Hollywood Fringe, I attended six performances, ranging in styles from autobiographical magic acts to political commentaries to drag shows. I was able to film four of these performances, in addition to filming one cabaret event at which ten pieces were performed. While there, I was also presented with the opportunity to volunteer one day at their Fringe Headquarters with the executive staff of the festival. In volunteering, I helped set up the space for their cabaret event that would occur later that day, spoke to curious passersby about fringe, and chatted with the full-time staff members.
I then spent the following nine days commuting from Durham, New Hampshire, to PortFringe in Portland, Maine, a significantly smaller festival, but no less exciting. In 2025, PortFringe hosted twenty-five pieces at six venues across the city and hosted approximately fifty artists, from local to international. Because PortFringe is a much smaller festival, it was easier to get closer contact with the fringe as an organization. I worked closely with Joshua Hsu on the media and communications team of PortFringe, which granted me free access to every show and permission from the artists to film their pieces. I had several meetings with Joshua and the rest of the media team, Sokvonny Chhouk and Anna Halloran, to discuss show coverage, daily festival operations and what to expect, and what type of recordings were needed. Over nine days, I attended twenty-one performances of which I was able to record twenty. A few highlights were a mind-reading magic show, a stand-up set about turning into your father, and a fever-dream puppet show played to a packed standing-room-only crowd.
My experience at both festivals varied from one to the other for reasons I attribute to the scale of the festival. In Portland, I was able to work at a closer professional level with the staff, simply because they have a smaller team and are eager for more hands on deck; this is not to say that in Hollywood I did not feel supported by the staff, but in Portland I was put in contact with artists and provided free entry into every show, while in Hollywood I had to contact artists myself and purchase tickets on my own. That being said, I connected more personally with the staff in Hollywood while volunteering because they were my peers, while the staff in Portland felt more like mentors or managers to me. I attribute the age difference not to the size of the festival, but to the age of those in the community. The (new) theatre scene in Hollywood is much younger, with nearby universities and recent graduates moving to LA to pursue a career in the arts, while those pursuing theatre in Portland likely already have an established career or are involved in theatre as a hobby, making the audiences and artists an older demographic.
Learning the Interview
In addition to attending performances and volunteering at fringes, I recruited several performers, directors, and staff members to participate in interviews that would help me build a documentary about fringe festivals, titled The Freedom of Fringe, which can now be found on YouTube. (This project is certified by the Institutional Review Board for working with human subjects, IRB number #IRB-FY2025-290.) In Portland, Joshua put me in contact with artists ahead of time, while in Hollywood, I had to approach them after shows and find a time to set up an interview that I could film in their fringe headquarters. I was able to interview one performer and two staff members in Hollywood, and six performers and one staff member in Portland. I spoke to participants about their experiences with and opinions on fringe, along with their perspectives on the creative process in relation to fringe festivals. There was certainly a learning curve to all of this—it took me a couple of tries to determine the best format for the interviews to ensure I had all the pieces I needed to create a narrative in the documentary.
Once I was back in Durham, I reviewed all the footage I had captured of performances and transcribed all interviews. The transcribed interviews functioned as the material with which I would collage together the script for the documentary—I identified common themes by sorting quotes from interviews into lists from which I could form a logical story. This left me with a long and colorful document full of text from which I could assemble the documentary; doing it made me aware of the topics that were talked about the most throughout the interviews and began to guide the thesis of the research, which defined the direction the documentary would go in. It was a patchwork-like process, especially once I moved from writing the script to editing the documentary together, full of reordering, cutting, pasting, and rewatching to ensure that the story flowed both logically and visually.
Throughout the entire process of creating this documentary, I received support from my mentor, David Kaye, a professor of acting and directing at UNH and fringe theatre veteran himself, having created and performed several plays at fringes as prestigious as Edinburgh and New York City. In our biweekly meetings, he helped focus my research questions and prepare me for filming, and provided feedback on drafts of my papers and the documentary itself. Above all, he was the most helpful at guiding my research. I was going into this process with no experience in making a documentary or attending fringe, and he set me up for success by highlighting the most important elements of fringe to pay attention to. He was also immensely helpful in preparing me to interview folks by giving me tips and tricks of the trade—for example, I wouldn’t have known to have my participants repeat the question to me on film had he not given me the heads-up.
Fringe as Opportunity
After spending several weeks embedded in two distinctly different festivals, I determined that the heart of American fringe lies in the opportunity it presents to its artists and audiences. Fringe provides opportunities for artists to express themselves via methods outside the mainstream, whether that be through an autobiographical underwater odyssey, a family-friendly magic show, or a stand-up routine about their father. Fringe, by its very definition, embraces the odd and unique, and makes a point to give time and space to those who don’t typically get their voices heard and to take risks on new work.
In the industry at large, whether that be community theatre or Broadway, the unfortunate goal is to appeal to the largest group possible with simplified plots, characters, and concepts, but with fringe, artists are encouraged to find a niche and explore it—the more specific, the better. Once in a blue moon an artist can be wildly creative and successful, but for the masses, they must pick one or the other. Through my research I determined that fringe’s outlook is to make art, regardless of the level of success it could create for the artist. Not only does this benefit the artist who gets the opportunity to produce their work, but it benefits the audience; when you have a collection of artists, all presenting something different and specific at a festival, an audience member is guaranteed to find something that speaks to them and to who they are.
An even simpler benefit to fringe is the fact that fringe is willing to put up new art by removing barriers to producing a show in the first place. As aforementioned, artists are hard-pressed to find a theatre that will produce a new show, regardless of how “mainstream” it is, because of how commercialized theatre has become. To produce a show at even a community level, it will cost the theaters thousands of dollars to create costumes and sets and pay the actors, not to mention maintaining their performance space and renting a rehearsal space. Theatres are unlikely to take risks on new pieces of work, which are less profitable because audiences aren’t willing to pay fifty to a hundred dollars for something they don’t know, or don’t know if they’re going to like. At fringe, it’s not the end of the world if audiences don’t like the show, because it’s likely they didn’t spend any more than twenty dollars on their ticket. Additionally, audiences come to fringe for the purpose of seeing new shows, so they’re prepared to take that risk—a risk that, often, pays off.
While some of these costs do apply to fringe shows, like renting space or paying actors, they are at a much smaller scale. Performance spaces are smaller and often at additionally discounted prices through the fringe organization. Producers, a hat frequently worn by an actor, writer, or director of the show, don’t have to bother with obtaining and paying for rights because the shows are new enough to not be formally published and require rights. Additionally, the nature of fringe is that it’s scrappy, so sets, costumes, and other technical needs are more likely to be relatively stripped back, reducing the cost. Fringe isn’t here for artists to execute a high-budget production, because audiences aren’t expecting to see thousands of dollars on stage.
Fringe as Community
Through my process of interviewing artists, the thread that connected all their stories was the community that fringe creates. Theatre, by nature, is community building, because no show can succeed individually, even if it’s a solo show. There are always other artists behind the scenes, directing, reviewing, editing, or creating, especially in the process of developing a new performance. Fringe’s focus on new theatre amplifies this community because everyone attending the festival is in the process of creating, looking for feedback, seeking connection, and breathing in something new.
While attending PortFringe, I felt like a connected and valued member of the community because at every show I went to, I was greeted by someone in the audience, and someone sat next to me to chat or asked to participate in the documentary. By the end of the festival, I found that I knew at least ten people in every audience because I had either met them at a previous show or seen the show they were in. I felt like a part of the community, rather than like an outsider coming in, because everyone there was looking to make a connection or learn something new.
At Hollywood Fringe, I felt the same effects through different means, because it’s a much larger festival; there were only a few times in which I recognized someone in the audience, but it was never someone I had spoken to before, only seen in passing. I noticed a larger number of individual audience members than in Portland and found myself striking up conversations with the people next to me, rather than waiting for someone to speak to me first. Because Hollywood is such a large city with people who are constantly networking about their careers, people were eager to get to know each other. Additionally, this festival taking place in a large city made me feel like a cog in a machine, but in a positive way. I knew I was one of hundreds of people who had traveled alone to be there, so I knew I wasn’t the only one feeling awkward to be by myself, which relieved a significant amount of that stress. It was also my first time traveling alone and taking on such a project alone, so the supportive embrace of fringe was the perfect environment for me to do this in.
Not only does fringe provide support through their community, but many fringe festivals offer artists’ programs for professional support. Hollywood Fringe is a fantastic example of this—they stay engaged with their artists year-round with workshops, networking events, and panels, open not only to fringe-specific artists, but to the general public as well. They provide extensive support to those entering fringe for the first time, hosting workshops like “How to Tech Your Show” and “How to Budget and Fundraise,” making fringe even more accessible than it already is. Additionally, as a nonprofit, they fundraise throughout the year to offer a scholarship program and an artist fund to provide support to low-income artists, because even though fringe is a much cheaper way to produce theatre, there are often gaps that need to be filled financially.
Conclusion
Though I came into this project knowing nothing about fringe and knowing little about making a documentary, I could not have picked a better subject. After receiving feedback from professors and peers, the vast majority emphasized that before watching my documentary, they had little to no knowledge of fringe but left feeling knowledgeable and curious about it, which was what I hoped would happen. The very making of this documentary felt like an act of fringe itself, because I was taking creative risks and learning on the go. I was able to lean on my mentor, David Kaye, for feedback and advice on the creation of the documentary, I learned about fringe culture from the artists who participated in my research, and I picked up the odd tip or two from those artists I met in passing. I’ve gained a heightened sense of self-confidence in traveling alone, being present in a new space, and taking on a large-scale project. I successfully conducted interviews, compiled and created a narrative within the documentary, and communicated the knowledge I’ve acquired. I was able to create a short film that spoke to fringe’s sense of community and emphasized its necessity to its audience, along with being an educational resource for those who don’t know what it is. But at the end of the day, I created a piece of art. Art that serves a purpose, tells a new story, and connects art with its audience, which couldn’t be more fringe than fringe itself.
I want to extend my deepest gratitude to David Kaye for not only his constant support and expert guidance through the duration of this project, but also for his skill and care as a professor in recognizing academic potential and drive in his students. To Joshua Hsu and the rest of the team at PortFringe, thank you for showing me the fringe ropes and for the instant passion and attention you gave to the doc. To Rody, Jeannette, and all the smiling faces at Hollywood Fringe, thank you for the warmest welcome, for making me feel like a part of the team, and for allowing me to use Headquarters to shoot interviews. To the Hamel Center and Mr. Dana Hamel and family, thank you for putting your faith and funds into the arts. Finally, and most critically, thank you to all the eager participants for invigorating conversations, heartfelt stories, and artistically rejuvenating performances.
View Olivia’s documentary .
Works Cited
Batchelder, Xela. “Structures of U.S. Fringes: An Outline for Archivists,” Performing Arts Resources, vol. 36, no 1, 2024. doi.org/10.3998/par.5038.
“Frequently Asked Questions about Edmonton’s Fringe,” Fringe Theatre Edmonton, . Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
“History of the Fringe.” Edinburgh Festival Fringe, . Accessed 28 Feb. 2025.
Stanton, Sarah, and Martin Banham. Cambridge Paperback Guide to Theatre. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Author and Mentor Bios
Olivia Krick is a senior at the Â鶹app studying acting and directing, musical theatre, and arts administration. She’s performed in over ten productions during her time at UNH while being a full-time student and working for the Department of Theatre and Dance as the office administrator and marketing contact. She is about to direct her capstone project— Interior: Panic by Tennessee Williams.
David Kaye is a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the Â鶹app, where he has been since 1996, serving as department chair from 2012 to 2017. He has worked throughout the US as a professional actor, director, and designer for such companies as the Texas Shakespeare Festival, the Maine Shakespeare Theatre at Monmouth, the National Theatre of the Performing Arts in NYC, Boston Chamber Theatre, and Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, Texas. He was awarded the Zornio Playwriting Prize for AND GOD SAID (!@#?!), which was co-written with Oded Gross and performed at the Montreal International Fringe Theatre Festival, where it was selected as a “top ten pick” by the Montreal Gazette.
Copyright 2026 © Olivia Krick
