Encounters with an Electric Mind

Christoper Cauffman Cooke (’27), Reb Martin (’27), Karen Orrick (’27), Maddie Roth (’27)
9/8 – 9

Do you struggle to know what to say in complex social situations? Do you feel it would be easier to make your point if you knew more facts? Do you sometimes forget important dates or names? Do you wish you had a personal assistant, or perhaps a friend, who could be by your side as you experience all of life, whispering support, advice, and offering suggestions of what you could respond in your ear? Here at Bombadil AI, the leader in tech innovations, we are so excited to introduce to you the M43 Neural Interface Breakthrough*, the latest in AI brain chip technology! It’s a friend, (permanently implanted) inside your head. 🙂

*Ask your doctor if the M43 Neural Interface Brain Chip is right for you. Do not take M43 if you are allergic to iron, copper, or cytoplasm. M43 can cause serious side effects, including severe allergic reactions, liver damage, and mild brain damage. Common side effects include headache, nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, fatigue, and excessive memory loss. Before implanting M43, tell your doctor about all your medical conditions and medications. Contact your healthcare provider immediately if you experience signs of an allergic reaction, new or worsening depression, or hallucinations. Implantation of M43 does not guarantee ongoing maintenance or updates by Bombadil AI. In the event of ecological tipping points making sustaining AI technology obsolete, Bombadil AI, nor its subsidiaries, can be held liable.

Plausible Deniability v 0.1

Ben Grinberg (Pig Iron Faculty, ’13)
9/8 – 9

It both is and isn’t a steam room and you both are and aren’t there to cruise. Be careful where you put your eyes.

Clowncuterie

Francesca Montanile Lyons (Pig Iron Staff, ’15)
9/8 – 15

A scrumptious and/or revolting variety show of bite-sized bits inspired by food from all spheres of Philly clownerie: across drag, burlesque, alt-comedy, & performance art. Flavors may be silly, or sexy, or sad – it’s a charcuterie of contemporary clown – it’s CLOWNCUTERIE!!!

Tuzluk

Izzy Sazak (’18)
9/8 – 22

Turkish-Colombian-American performer, Izzy Sazak, takes the audience on a wild ride; unpacking the awkward beauty of growing up mixed, caught between two empires worth of daddy issues and messy history. Tuzluk lovingly deconstructs the myth of the neo-liberal hero-man; mixing geopolitics with a hilarious, heartfelt and fast paced examination of identity and inheritance. Tuzluk deftly weaves together a collage of memory and fantasy to tell a story of making peace with the one thing none of us get to choose- one’s fortune.

* Tuzluk: turkish for “salt shaker”, and the colloquial name for the popular children’s paper fortune teller game.

Invited Dress: The “Porno”

William Acker (’25)
9/8 – 23

H0T SH3MAL3 BARES ALL L1VE!

(It’s the story of a steel claw.)

a peep at a show of a girl who sells her story and her body to show you love, to show you she’s worth loving, to show you she’s worth living, she’s even better live !!!

(It’s just a television wonderland. Just one more fairy tale about a rich bitch lying by the swimming pool. Life is so cruel.)

a collection of intimate videos, intimate moments, in the moment, just a moment while i gather my composure, composition, camera angles, camera angel

(Easy living when you make the rules.)

things you shouldn’t say, things you shouldn’t do, do you think i’m pretty? do you still like me? some things are better left unsaid, something about things left unsaid

(Last Friday was the first time. It took only about half a minute on the stairway. It was child’s play.)

a love letter to sex workers, a love spell for sex workers, a love spell from a sex worker, a love spell from a root worker

(The odds turn out even when you give up believing in the cold law, steel claw. Try to get on board you find the lock is on the door, well I say no way. No way! Don’t try to get out or there’ll be hell to pay.)

an invited dress rehearsal for a live taping of a “pornographic” film

(I don’t know who’s right, who’s wrong, but it really doesn’t matter when you’re lying in the gutter.)

tr*nny porn, trauma porn, rock bottoms as trampolines

(It’s a see-saw, a long hot battle with the cold law.)

a tina turner tribute

(It’s what you get for messing with the steel claw.)

Offstage Onstage: Everything You Didn’t See the Greeks Do

Connor Hogan (’19), Brooke Shilling (’21)
9/8 – 25

Strange Root, or the murder of PT Barnum by Joice Heth

Jenn Kidwell (’13)
9/9 – 12

Lunar Retreat

Nichole Canuso (Pig Iron School Faculty)
9/9 – 20

The moon is leaving us, slowly, imperceptibly, shifting one inch further from Earth each year.

Lunar Retreat is an interactive, multi-sensory performance inspired by the gradual distance growing between the moon and the earth. This immersive journey invites audiences to wander, witness, and reflect on how we move through care, loss, and transformation—both individually and collectively.

Created by choreographer Nichole Canuso in collaboration with ocean explorer and visual artist Rebecca Rutstein, experimental sound designer Bobby McElver, video designer Kate Freer, set designer Anna Kiraly, and a visionary cast of performers, Lunar Retreat opens a space for poetic, playful, and communal connection with the shifting rhythms of our planetary bodies. Lunar Retreat reflects on our deep evolutionary ties to the ocean and the moon, reminding us that we are all interconnected with the natural world.

Lunar Retreat is built upon gentle invitations, individualized prompts, and communal activities through which you are offered opportunities to engage along your own chosen path and move at your own pace. Come as you are. Wander. Reflect. Return.

Dolls

Ryann Elise (’25)
9/9 – 27

Step inside the Doll’s House, we’ve been expecting you. The Franklin Inn Club is transformed into a living playroom, where our peculiar Nora holds court. In this bold re-envisioning of Ibsen’s classic, the audience is transported into the imagination of an 11-year-old girl who acts out her life with you, her dolls. Can she break free of her world of toys, or will she forever be stuck as a plaything for others? Inspired by EgoPo’s 2013 Fringe hit created by Brenna Geffers, starring Emmeline and Lane Savadove.

John Miller Giltner’s A Christmas Carol

John Miller Giltner (’20)
9/9 – 27

Turmoil and heavy ass shit has come to the three spooky ghosts made famous by Charles Dickens Christmas Carol. As greed and corruption rule in our time, their attempts to haunt billionaires fall on deaf ears. Their warnings bounce off private islands, ketamine therapy, and underground bunkers.

Desperate to save the world and restore Christmas cheer, they must now turn to the one person who can still be haunted for good:

a dumbass stoner named me.

And here’s the whole freaking deal: if I don’t change, Christmas is more dead than Kristi Noem with a new puppy.

Can a nobody change the world?

I don’t know.

Betsy Ross Groundhog Day

Patrick Burke (’23), Grace Lazarz (’26)
9/10 – 20

The Suppliants

Matt McPherson (’27)
9/10 – 23

Inspired by Aeschylus’ “The Suppliants” – one of the oldest surviving plays in the Western canon – this new ensemble-driven production reimagines an ancient story through the lens of Appalachian folklore.

A group of storytellers gathers to retell an old tale. As they do, the barriers between past and present dissolve. What first seems like an old legend gradually reveals itself to be a story about agency, belonging, and the choices communities make about what we owe to each other.

Blending elements of Greek tragedy, folk traditions, movement, and devised performance, the play explores how stories travel across generations and why certain myths refuse to disappear.

Double the Trouble!

Ari Allen (’26), Margo Cramer (’26), Nico Montalvo (’26), Laura Schmidt (’26), Joshua Schwirtz (’26)
9/10 – 26

BoyGirl Gymnastics

MK Korbisch (’23), Heather Hosford (’23)
9/10 – 27

Isabelle Clark and Madison David are the most popular girls but not popular in the way that you may be thinking popular. They are popular at gymnastics and not so much at school. Which if you think about it is actually way more impressive because school is easy and gymnastics is hard. Gymnastics is really hard.

But so is life. And their life? Is gymnastics. And their sleepovers? Full-time jobs. First to fall asleep? Youre fired. Youre dead. This is basically the olympics, in terms of stakes. Olympic sized stakes. Served rare, bleeding.

This piece investigates the question: what would you do if your best friend was lying? And just how deep does the rabbit lie inside its hole?

Tumble into a world of these two characters’ logic, where the ridiculous comes out to play. This piece mashes forms and screws with the space time continuum. Balancing on the beams of abstract, stylized gymnastics, art imitating life, layers of play and players in lairs. Bodies making shapes and lines, bodies weeping, bodies lying, and soliloquizing. All the while challenging ourselves to exist in the magic quickness of a child’s emotional life in order to honor the big awkward feelings we have at any age.

FORIEGNER

Sohrab Haghverdi (’20)
9/11 – 22

This FORIEGNER hopes his genius performance gets him naturalized—or deported.

A dizzying solo that simultaneously explains—and refuses to explain—Sohrab Haghverdi’s experience as an Iranian asylum seeker. A paradoxical, autobiographical, anti-identity, anti-comedy clown show inspired by Andy Kaufman’s hijinks and Sufi mystic Rumi’s call to kill yourself (بمیرید).

Chekov’s Banana Peel

Brian Bowyer (’23), Graham Cook (’24), Sarah Owens (’23), Rose Weiss (’23)
9/11 – 26

Four masterpieces. Four acts each. Dozens of miserable Russians, a doomed cherry orchard, a dead seagull, and exactly one hour to get through it all. What could possibly go wrong?

Welcome to Chekhov’s Banana Peel, the debut production from 21st Century Commedia. This high-octane, relentlessly physical production takes the complete works of Anton Chekhov, the undisputed master of existential subtext and melancholy drama and strips away the subtext entirely. Armed with nothing but physical theatre, high-energy clowning, precision mime, and a healthy dose of theatrical anarchy, our ensemble attempts the impossible: a breakneck, abridged marathon of Chekhov’s greatest plays.

Chekhov’s Banana Peel is a hilarious, virtuosic, and irreverent collision of highbrow dramatic theory and lowbrow physical comedy. It’s a love letter to the theater, a wrecking ball to the classics, and an unforgettable hour of comedic crisis. Whether you are a die-hard fan of Russian realism or just love a perfectly executed tumble, this show is the chaotic, absurd escape your Fringe festival needs.

BEHOLD! the angel clown show

Francesca Montanile Lyons (Pig Iron Staff, ’15)
9/11 – 27

An accidental emissary of the holey host stumbles onto our mortal plane. Messy, salacious, and confused, this ancient and childlike being has a message for humanity… but how can it get anything done while every atom and sense of its new body screams with delightful, delicious, and terrible urgency?!

Let this supernatural being take you for an hour of surreal sacramental exchanges, including apocalyptic fanfares and ecstasies, a serenade to feet, and an ode to holes.

Volta

William Acker (’25), Aiden Ankli (’25), Tenera Calem (’25), Arantxa Chavez (’25), Jo Kramer-Bailey (’25)
9/12 – 14

When Wren arrives at the Mariposa Hotel, she is certain something bad has happened, and she will fix it by finding her sister Lottie. Yet nothing at the Mariposa Hotel moves or functions in quite the way Wren expects. Staff pops out of walls, doors lead to museums where memories stand like sculptures, people call loved ones from other dimensions, and she keeps just missing Lottie. And throughout, a writhing, pulsing, shifting mass invites her to join blissful oblivion. As Wren searches for Lottie, she revisits her life in fits and bursts, finding tenderness, bitterness, loss, and celebration in equal measure.

VOLTA is a play about love’s guiding power as we learn to let go.

Volpe and Líadan

Michael Amendola (’25), Jonah Godfrey (’23)
9/12 – 27

“What would you sacrifice for love?”

Volpe & Líadan unearths the epic tale of two unlikely lovers on a perilous quest to steal a legendary Chrômivâl from the tyrannical shadow-lord Âyneråkt the Only. Part fantasy-heist, part fireside ballad, this immortal story of mortal sacrifice sings of shadows and stars, tricksters and beasts, and the consequences of reaching beyond one’s fate.

Featuring the wordplay of Dóla the Bard, the music and direction of Jónah the Troubadour, and a seasoned ensemble of performers, the production weaves original folk song, puppetry, and stylized physical theater to summon an otherworld of magical creatures and unforgettable characters.

Pit Fractal

Rose Carver (’27), Josh Needles-Braun (’27)
9/13

The Groundhog

Francesca Montanile Lyons (Pig Iron Staff, ’15)
9/13 – 26

Voynich

Nick Gillette (’13)
9/13 – 27

How can we communicate when words fail? If the need is desperate enough, can we escape language and still be understood?

The Voynich Manuscript is a real, 15th century codex written in an unknown language. Alongside 240 pages of text in a unique alphabet, it depicts people bathing in strange contraptions, botanical details of unknown plants, and astrological star charts unlike any on earth. Some scholars suggest it is a complex hoax, yet text analysis and information theory suggest the letter and word frequency match those of a real language.

VOYNICH is an Homeric tale of love, loss, and redemption performed in that mysterious, unknown language. Fringie award winning artist Nick Gillette transcends the language barrier with physical theater, mask, and object puppetry.

Mischief Night Masters

Sarah Knittel (’16)
9/17

“I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.” — Aeschylus

Mischief Night Masters is the RETURN of a once-in-a-generation convergence of Philadelphia’s most exacting and exalted artists. In a night of ecstatic rupture and brutal refinement they summon a force beyond performance—pure invocation. Time folds form breaks the air thickens. What is revealed cannot be unseen. Those permitted to witness will not return the same. Hosted by Betty J. Smithsonian and Sarah Knittel.

All Below

Parker Matthews (’18)
9/17 – 18

“All Below” is a multimedia devised two-person theatre performance that exists in a pocket universe between clown, cosmic horror, and 19th century poetry. Also, there are puppets.

Drawing inspiration from Carlo Rovelli’s book on quantum physics, The Order of Time, as well as the magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges, the performance maroons two Victorian explorers outside of the flow of linear time as their minds attempt to grapple with the impossible and unknowable in their exploration(s) of the phantom island of Saxemberg.

Egg and How I Learned to Save Myself

Nicole Burgio (Pig Iron School Faculty), Jo Kramer-Bailey (’25)
9/17 – 27

A woman falls into a haunting internal dreamscape as part of her EMDR guided therapy session. There she must reckon with a past version of herself stuck in a vicious loop. The shared negative self beliefs, shameful memories, and past traumas manifest as literal eggs, and the woman and her past self dance, contort, and eventually fly out of the dreamscape towards a hopeful future.

“Egg, and How I Learned To Save Myself” is a genre-bending movement story living at the intersection of physical theatre, dance, and circus arts. Proud to be ‘weird but not boring’, the duet is performed by Nicole Burgio and Jo Kramer-Bailey, two award-winning Philadelphia based performance artists. The story is told with no spoken or written text, using hand balancing, contortion, aerial dance, and the rare circus art of hair suspension. Its central question: what if your past and present selves met and attempted to help each other? “Egg, and How I Learned To Save Myself” is a surreal, magical, eerie, yet optimistic encounter, beckoning all who live in a milieu of avoidance and shame to instead seek self-forgiveness and connection.

Love Abide With You, The Birthplace Quilts

mike durkin (’17)
9/18 – 19

What does it mean to be an American today? What does it mean to be born and reside in the birthplace of America?

Love Abide With You is a performance and quilting project looking at those questions. mike will be working with members of the Kensington area community in story-sharing circles on the concept of birthplace. Participants will collaborate to create a series of performative quilts. This process will culminate in an airing of the quilts, as well as a story-sharing event where audience members can contribute to the final quilts.

With each participant making a square symbolic of the concept of ‘birthplace’ all of these squares will be sewn together to make a series of quilts. Participants will share stories, memories, hopes, and dreams of the Philadelphia landscape. Thinking about where we were, where we are, and where the city is heading.

The project is ultimately about slowing down and being present with each other. We will engage in conversations of the past, the history of the birthplace of America, while also dreaming about the future, how to bring new life into this world. But this is a project that keeps us grounded, all hand-sewn, process-driven, building of community. As we see the country gearing up with the 250th anniversary, American fervor has and will continue to run high. Meaning, there will be a deeper sense of “American pride” prioritizing a pro-American narrative. This project confronts and challenges this narrative, finding a balance between celebrating and critiquing what it means to be American today.

This will all lead to a series of community quilts reflective and referencing the Kensington area in vacant lots, parks, or other spaces in the neighborhood with participants sharing their stories around birthplace. The airing of the quilts will occur at parks and will combine poetry, live-quilting, dance and ritual.

Raptures From the Godhole

MK Korbisch (’23)
9/18 – 20

The Madness of Hestia

Jeff Evans (’18)
9/19

Gorgeous Gorgus

Frankie Gormley (’25)
9/19 – 27

Ideas of Grandeur

Emmit Ashford (’27)
9/20 – 26

This is the performance that will change everything. This will take her from overdraft status to EGOT status. And as promised on every flyer posted on every street corner her ex passes on the way to work, IMANI will show you all. All that’s left from years of hiding away, tweezing, and holding it in.

Morning of, she’s found sleeping off a wild night in her bathtub. And during a ridiculous but effective warmup (one that almost justifies the crippling student debt) she inadvertently activates parts of herself that have been itching to get out. These past roles have their own dream roles. They intend to perform them tonight.

Inspired by the work of Richard C. Schwartz, PHD on the Internal Family System (IFS), Ideas of Grandeur is about rediscovering freedom through acceptance and through cultivating healthy relationships with our human parts. Between the song, the movement, and the personal hygiene, it’s occupied!

What She Really Wants

Skye Fort (Pig Iron Staff)
9/22 – 24

William Acker is William Acker and William Acker is Runing for the Mayor of Philadelphia

William Acker (’25)
9/26 – 27