Why I Unabashedly Love the Hollywood Fringe Festival

I unabashedly love the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Community, craft, the chance to make something real and the occasional unsettling personal revelation you didn’t ask for but probably needed. It’s all here.

I first participated in 2024, producing my friend Natalie’s show I’LL BE WITH YOU IN A MINUTE. I’d attended before, of course, as a civilian. The way you attend a party at someone else’s house before you realize you might actually want to throw one. During that festival I met fellow artists, went to twelve shows and learned in real time what it takes to produce a play. I came out of it knowing two things: I wanted more of this and I was woefully underprepared for how much of this I wanted.

2025 answered that call. I produced and performed in stuck, a two-hander that exists because of Sam Ciavarella, who not only suggested we keep our reserved theater when my original production collapsed, but arrived two weeks later with the story idea that became the show and brought in her brother Brandon Ciavarella to write it. Without them, there is no stuck.

The show came together in 35 days under conditions that would have broken a sensible person: no locked script when tickets went on sale, no sound designer and a director who dropped out the day of our first table read: they’d booked a major film, the sort of thing you can only applaud while internally screaming. We found our director Rosalind Bevan with just over a month left and she helped us build something special out of controlled chaos. Five sold-out performances. A Hollywood Fringe Exchange Award with Fringe Italia Off. Not bad for a show I was still memorizing ten days before we opened.

That same year I attended 37 shows and was transformed by more than a few. Spencer Weitzel and Callie Ott in DOG OF CARNAGE stopped me cold. The kind of performances that make you sit in your car afterward because you’re not ready to re-enter the world. I walked out having made a private decision: these people will be my friends. A year later I cast Spencer in my own show. Callie asked me to be in her short film. This is what happens when you pay attention at the Fringe.

I also saw remarkable work from Mark Vigeant, Hailey McAfee, Woody Fu, Will McFadden, Mandy Rubeli, James Ferrero, Ann Noble and Molly Sharpe – artists who collectively raised the bar of what I thought I could attempt. Edinburgh Fringe in 2026 pushed it further. I came home certain of one thing: I needed to write a play.

So here we are. COFFEE DATE is my first play. I wrote it, I’m in it and I’ve applied nearly everything I’ve learned about what works and what detonates beautifully in your face. I built a full team: a producing partner, a director, a sound designer, a graphic designer whose work holds its own against nearly 500 shows at this festival. In doing so, I freed myself to focus on the writing and acting. I joined the team in the casting process, which I’d never done before and discovered it’s one of the most instructive things an actor can do for themselves.

I’ve heard the Fringe called an amateur arts festival. Maybe that was true in the past, but allow me to disagree, loudly and with specifics: there are working actors here constantly sharpening their craft. TV writers whose credits span Hulu, Netflix and network television developing new work under festival conditions. Streaming executives in the audience, quietly taking notes. Just yesterday I spotted one of the biggest actors in network television at one performance and a legendary science fiction writer at another. Nobody announced themselves. That’s kind of the point.

The Hollywood Fringe is the largest arts festival in Los Angeles and it has a way of arriving in your life at exactly the right moment, whether or not you planned it that way. Show up. Pay attention. Stay open.

The rest tends to take care of itself.