Atlanta Fringe Festival approaches 14th year with the promise to be wild and weird 

The 2026 Atlanta Fringe Festival will return for its 14th year from May 27 to June 7, and many participants from past Fringe shows are happy to be returning to its stages.

Among the 49 scheduled shows chosen by lottery from a record 150 applicants and two shows for Kids Fringe, many local and touring performers have come back to Atlanta Fringe to perform at the Festival’s seven venues. Individual tickets and multishow passes are available to purchase at the Atlanta Fringe website.

Executive Director Diana Brown said in an interview that this year’s Fringe is particularly exciting for her because, with a strong infrastructure in place, including new Festival Director Tori Waddell handling day-to-day management, she is able to concentrate on the continued growth of the Festival. 

“That was always the idea — that we were building something that would hopefully last 130 years into the future,” Brown said. “This will be a brave new year for Atlanta Fringe. Since Tori is around to focus on this year, I can focus on two or three years ahead — maybe set some things in motion that would be really good for Atlanta’s future.”

Brown mentioned the possibilities of growing Kids Fringe or international partnerships with other Fringe festivals. Other festivals, such as the enduring Edinburgh Fringe Festival, provide theater artists working with experimental theater an opportunity to showcase their work on their terms. This year’s shows in Atlanta include magic shows, dance pieces, clown performances and lots of storytelling. Fringe shows can be wilder and weirder than glossy work in traditional spaces.

Augustus Graves, who performed in the 2025 Atlanta Fringe Festival before moving to Austin, Texas, will return to the 7Stages Mainstage with DEATH: CLOCK, featuring theatrical magic and mentalism involving the audience. It centers around the question of what someone would do if they knew how much time they had left to live.

Graves said the Atlanta Fringe Festival means a great deal to him.

“Atlanta is a city that has always embraced bold, strange, heartfelt art in a way that feels rare,” he said. “The Fringe Festival in particular has become such an important space for artists to take risks and tell deeply personal stories, and I’m really honored to be part of it again this year.”

Comedian Madeline Evans, who appeared as part of the puppet improv troupe Edgewood Avenue last year, is bringing her hit show Road Trip to The Supermarket black box venue. Road Trip, featuring improv comedy inspired by guest storytellers, is performed regularly at improv stages across Atlanta, including Dad’s Garage.

Evans is excited because the five scheduled Fringe performances will all feature a different storyteller and a revolving cast of improvisers.

“Whoever’s seeing this Fringe — people who live in Atlanta; people who are coming from out of town — they’re going to get a taste of our improv scene,” Evans said. “And they’re going to see that there’s something worth talking about here.”

Tim Millard, who performed as an improviser at Atlanta Fringe in past years, is returning to the Festival as a storyteller with a solo show, After Careful Consideration. The show will focus upon his real-life experiences in the modern job market after a layoff. He said he believes the Metropolitan Studios show will be very relatable in this climate, full of highs and lows.

“At a hiring event recently, there was one thing that really stood out to me that was surprising and quite frankly heartbreaking,” he said in a recent interview. “There were so many people at this job networking and advice event who appeared to be in their 50s and maybe even their 60s. Think about that for a second. These are people who should be in the twilight of a successful career or preparing for retirement. Instead, they’re at an event, learning how to network, how to interview, how to update their resumes. I think that is a surprising snapshot of the job market these days when you have people of those ages who are actively looking for work.”

Two past solo performers, Dani Herd and Billie Sainwood, are also set to perform Herd x Sainwood at Metropolitan Studios in a geeky, fun show celebrating their mutual love of fanfiction and friendship.

‘“Both having done solo shows, it’s just so much responsibility on your own with the things that go wrong and also the things that go right,” Herd said. “I’m very proud of my one-person show, but I found it a very lonely experience. And so the joy of having someone to back and forth with about this whole process has been so delightful and such a relief. It has been really fun to have a buddy.”

Fringe is also bringing back a bunch of clowns. Chase Brantley is a clown performer from Athens, Georgia, who has toured internationally with his madcap show Don Toberman: Ping-Pong Champ. Brantley is bringing the show to 7 Stages this year from Dynamic El Dorado, which he said will allow the show to increase its scope.

“This version also has more spectacle,” he said. “So I will have burlesque backup dancers. I do an aerial silk routine. It’ll just be a lot bigger and more fun and more in the world of parodying high-profile sports events, like the Super Bowl and stuff like that — so bigger space; more energy; more absurdity.”

Clown Miles Calderon — who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York — is bringing his Mr. Cardboard character back in a solo show, The Passion of Mr. Cardboard, at Dynamic El Dorado. He said he’s happy to return home.

The new show has a wacky inspiration, he said.

“I loved the kind of balance between drama and comedy that Mr. Cardboard can strike,” Calderon said. “So I was like, what’s the most dramatic story out there? And I decided I would place him in a rough Christ narrative, a sacrifice, redemption, rebirth sort of arc.”

Finally, a number of experimental plays are getting the chance to develop at Atlanta Fringe this year, among them playwright C.G. Brown’s Babylon Is An Action Verb — a three-man play in iambic pentameter about a church-based men’s accountability group — and Loser Bitches, a play about a friendship-centered podcast that starts to crack under pressure developed by Zach Tellez, Danielle Montgomery and Abby Folds.

Fringe provides developing artists with the chance to produce the work they want on their own terms, Tellez said.

“There are so many creatives, and you have to constantly be shopping yourself around,” he said. “Fringe is just a wonderful opportunity to get out there and be like, ‘So this is what we have, this is what we’re doing and we’re doing it the best way we can with what we have right now.”’

Where and When

The 14th annual Atlanta Fringe Festival runs from May 27 to June 7 and features various shows, locations and ticket prices.

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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.