If Greater Cincinnati is a conservative region filled with tight-ass people, the Cincy Fringe Festival is a laxative. It loosens us up, gets things moving a little better and smoother. Maybe the Fringe Festival is fiber in our otherwise meat-and-potatoes cultural diet. The annual event helps balance out the rest of our stodgy, by-the-book year.

The Cincy Fringe Festival soon kicks off its sixth annual celebration of offbeat theater and other art forms. Not every city has a Fringe Festival, and occasionally people ask why we have one. The quick response is similar to the one sometimes offered as to why a city needs an alternative newsweekly like CityBeat: A conservative, buttoned-down place needs events and media that shake things up, that give us a new perspective on things.

Jay Kalagayan’s departure from Know Theatre, the company he founded in 1997, surprised a lot of people. He evolved from founder to actor, writer, artistic director, executive director and development director. I wondered if perhaps he simply ran out of roles to play. In reality, he’s evolved: He married Jan in 2006 and they now have a daughter. Kalagayan, who came to Cincinnati from Virginia to attend Xavier University, launched what was first called the “Know Theatre Tribe” to create a kind of family locally.

For this episode we recorded the Fringe Festival performance Incredulity. It's an improvisational piece that was recorded on May 28 by Ashley Thomas....

On this episode we'll check out the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, a marathon of new and offbeat theatrical works running through June 6. Our guests are...