This is a milestone year for the Cincinnati Fringe Festival — its 20th iteration. In a recent phone conversation with CityBeat, Katie Hartman, back for her second year as the Fringe producer, said that this year’s 40 performances were selected from 100 applicants. Presented from June 2-17, the 2023 Fringe Festival will utilize six venues across Over-the-Rhine: Know Theatre (1120 Jackson St., the Fringe headquarters), three lecture halls at the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1212 Jackson St.), Gabriel’s Corner (Sycamore at Liberty) and 1316 Main St.

“The 1316 space is especially meaningful,” Hartman says, “because it’s a return to what Cincinnati Fringe began as — a festival that activated vacant and unused spaces, reimagined and energized by artists and patrons.” She calls it a reminder “that all you need to make theater are three elements: an empty space, an actor and an audience.” The Main Street venue will also be the site for a pair of “All Ages” shows on weekend afternoons that are free/pay-what-you-can, family-friendly offerings: Trolls! Trolls! Trolls! by Autumn Kaleidoscope and Fantastical Tales by storyteller Paul Strickland.

The Cincinnati Fringe has established a reputation across the United States as a destination theater festival for performers who work a circuit of shows during the summer months. “Cincy Fringe is the largest of the small fringes in North America,” she points out. “Performers want to come because we’re know for our community as well as our art.” Local audiences are devoted. “People who started coming to the Cincy Fringe in its early days are bringing their kids now.”

The local community’s devotion is built and enhanced by nightly gatherings at Know Theatre’s Underground Bar, reopened this year after an extended pandemic closure. “Every night after performances are finished, we have after-hours parties with themed events,” Hartman says. “The bar is where patrons and artists can relax and connect.” That personal interaction is a hallmark of Cincy Fringe.

Hartman, who first came to Cincinnati as a fringe performer, is convinced that this festival is a unique entity. “I see so much radical generosity and radical empathy happening at this festival that I really believe it changes people for the better.” That’s what convinced her to take on her administrative role.

For more information about the Cincinnati Fringe Festival lineup, visit cincyfringe.com.

Keep scrolling for some quick takes on nine Cincinnati Fringe Festival shows to consider.

1nce Upon a Lie For a decade Paul Strickland, who lives in Covington, has been a favorite at Fringe Festivals across the U.S. and Canada. The award-winning storyteller will again conjure up “Ain’t True & Uncle False” and the denizens of the Big Fib Trailer Park cul-de-sac, plus a bit of his own storytelling and songs that are both hilarious and heartfelt. Strickland has developed a national reputation, and he’s joined the big leagues of storytelling with a gig at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, Oct. 6-8. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Bloodline A semi-autobiographical one-man love story by Paris Crayton III, Bloodline is a multi-generational love story of three men with the same name. You’ll meet his grandfather, a sharecropper who courts a beautiful woman in a juke joint; then his father, an animal technician; and Payton III himself, a starving artist. His show won awards at the venerable Orlando Fringe. In reality, he’s a successful playwright from Atlanta. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Cry Wulf Boris Dansberry charmed Cincy Fringe audiences in 2022 with Changing My Major to Joan. A Northern Kentuckian transplanted to Philadelphia, he’s now a queer theater artist. His story, using puppets, is one of heroism, blood, absolute evil and puppets. The story he tells is rooted in the toxic masculinity of the Old English epic Beowulf, a hero’s journey that encompasses the human condition. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Dad (hates) Jokes Jon Bennett from Adelaide, Australia (who bills himself as “2 Hoots Productions”) has performed in more than 125 festivals and in Fire in the Meth Lab that he brought to the 2022 Cincy Fringe. This time around the comedian talks about his extremely conservative father, a very serious but accident-prone man who has died… more than once. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Keeping Our Torch Pones, the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky dance collaborative that has offered numerous movement-based performances at past Cincy Fringes, will present a dance-infused program to celebrate diverse, real-life stories of intergenerational wisdom and joy. These tales were collected by Pones artists and passed along to elder/aging artists to interpret into vignettes on creative aging. Pones believes that art creates powerful change. Presented at Gabriel’s Corner. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Made in America Teruko Nakajima is an actor, dancer, singer, writer, woman, Asian, first-generation immigrant and American who was born in a family of artists in Tokyo. Her performance is a brutally honest, surprisingly entertaining and heartbreakingly life-affirming love letter to the human experience. Performing with her dog, Titi, she offers a show for anyone fighting to make their dreams come true. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Happy Go Lucky Yanomi Shoshinz is one of Japan’s most renowned comedy acts, using physical theater and puppets to tell beautiful stories. For the 2015 Cincy Fringe, she presented the delightful Kiss Around Pass Around. Her 2023 piece is about people — and puppets — who tend not to express their feelings directly. She wonders if it’s a universal struggle that humans (and puppets) face — to be honest in communicating with others. As she suggests, “Maybe only a puppet can answer this question.” Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
plosive! Cincinnati-based Performance Gallery has offered inventively varied performances at every and every Cincy Fringe for 20 years. This year they will deftly dissect and reorganize the sound mechanics of human speech as they did in fricative (2008) and Vox Box (2018). Their performance will be a fascinating vocal collage of fricatives, diphthongs, triphthongs, plosives and more. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival
Thread and Bone Lisa Egan Woods is a new Fringe performer from Versailles, Kentucky. Thread and Bone is a piece about memory meeting a sewing machine. Her funny, always honest solo performance is part memoir, part eulogy and part dressmaking project. In an intimate patchwork of love, family, grief and heart-surgery survival, Woods and her sewing machine tear apart and re-stitch a dress in less than an hour. Photo: Provided by Cincinnati Fringe Festival

RICK PENDER has written about theater for CityBeat since its first issues in 1994. Before that he wrote for EveryBody’s News. From 1998 to 2006 he was CityBeat’s arts & entertainment editor. Retired...