The 19th Annual San Francisco Fringe Theater Festival

The San Francisco Fringe Festival has been a fixture in San Francisco for nearly two decades. In the spirit of The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the SF Fringe is a diverse, uncurated mass of theatrical art which favors straightforward performances and no-nonsense production. The festival runs from September 8th to 19th this year.

The festival is organized so that you can easily see multiple shows in a night. Shows start at the same time at all the theaters (all of which are within a short walk of each other, so even on weekdays you have 3 or 4 plays to choose from at each of the timeslots. Each show performs 3 to 5 times over the course of the two weeks. As usual tickets are kept at $10 or less to make it affordable and encourage you to see more than one show.

As usual the range of shows is wide this year from solo shows focused on real people (Cesar Chavez, Walt Whiman, and William S Burroughs) to sketch comedy to original plays about Death, Phone Sex and Dieting.

Here are some of the shows in this year’s fest:

The Burroughs and Kookie Show: Late Night in the Interzone

Bad Day to be a Juggler

Road Trip to Pluto: The Bitter Planet

VITCH in “VITCH Slapped”

The Stories of Cesar Chavez

mikl-em
Mikl-em

Actor, nerd, poet, producer, writer mikl-em made his name short so you wouldn't have to. In addition to his blog you can find his writing in "Hi Fructose" magazine and witness him almost life-sized in various plays at The Dark Room Theater in SF's Mission district.

He tends to write about theater, humor, San Francisco culture and history, and stuff that's just plain weird. He thanks Scott for sharing the keys to the Laughing Squid virtual HQ and promises to uphold whatever it is that the mirthful cephalopod would prefer to be uplifted.