Makers Gotta Make: The Edinburgh Shows We’re Watching For

I am writing this having just returned from a whirlwind trip to Edinburgh, where I saw about twenty shows in three days. Musicals, plays, one-person shows, comedy, performance art. Two of them started in Orchard Project rooms in Saratoga Springs, and many others worth seeing feature artists in our wonderful OP family.

Put simply, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is one of the most inspiring sources of art one can experience in any given year. And knowing what we all know about the economics of making culture right now: what it costs to open a show in New York, what has happened to regional seasons, how many companies are producing less than they were five years ago: a festival like Edinburgh ought to read as denial.

More than 3,600 shows from 71 countries, crammed into three and a half weeks, most of them losing money. It ought to feel like a party at the wrong time.

It doesn’t. Not for a minute.

Makers gotta make.

That is the actual engine: not the commercial market, not the strategy, not anyone’s five-year plan. People who make things cannot stop making them, and will absorb a startling amount of nonsense in order to keep going.

What Edinburgh also corrects, every year, is the word visionary. It reminds us that some of the most visionary moments come in the most intimate and smallest spaces. For most people, that word has quietly come to mean scale: Christopher Nolan and an IMAX camera, the largest available machine pointed at the largest available idea.

As much as I love a giant film, I spent last week in rooms of eighty people watching work I would call visionary by any measure that counts.

Those visionary moments are small enough to fit tiny theatres, but hit just as big as the visuals in The Odyssey. Thaddeus Phillips building a globe-crossing silent film in front of you out of eighty vintage toys, a hidden camera, and a table. Grace McLean singing Alex Bechtel’s Penelope, hitting one note that encapsulates twenty years of waiting in a basement room off the Cowgate. And in Big Stuff, an audience member plays a border guard, with one line landing differently at every performance because of who that person turns out to be.

Scale is a budget. Vision is a decision about where to put an audience’s attention, and how much to trust them once it is there.

The shows below are not a list of current bookings or a schedule to follow. They are works we loved: some developed at The Orchard Project, some made by members of our artistic community, and some we encountered because they were doing something unusually alive. Many are likely to travel to stages elsewhere. Keep an eye out.

Shows Developed at The Orchard Project

Big Stuff

Created by Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, co-created and directed by Kat Sandler, Big Stuff is a fast, funny, unexpectedly moving two-hander about a U-Haul full of dead parents’ belongings: the basement clutter, the objects nobody wants, and the memories that outlast both.

The audience brings things in. No two performances are the same show.

There is something beautifully precise about the premise. We inherit rooms full of objects and are asked to decide what they mean, what they are worth, and whether keeping them is an act of love or simply a refusal to let go. Baram and Snieckus make that emotional negotiation comic, participatory, and deeply human.

Big Stuff was developed in The Orchard Project’s 2026 Performance Lab in Saratoga Springs.

Penelope

Twenty years of waiting, told at last by the woman who did the waiting.

With a book by Alex Bechtel, Grace McLean, and Eva Steinmetz; music, lyrics, and arrangements by Bechtel; direction by Steinmetz; and a performance by McLean, Penelope reimagines The Odyssey through the eyes of Penelope herself.

The show began as a concept album written by Bechtel during the first months of the pandemic, when he was separated from his partner. It has since grown into an intimate work of concert theatre about isolation, devotion, memory, and the agency that can be found inside waiting.

The Orchard Project supported Penelope in 2020 and brought it to Saratoga Springs in 2022, including a memorable night at Caffe Lena. Its later productions at Hudson Valley and Signature were seeded through our OP Forward program. You can learn more about the work’s development on its Orchard Project portfolio page.

From Our Artists and Alumni

Legendary

Cheeyang Ng, an Orchard Project Performance Lab artist from 2025, takes apart the Chinese myths they grew up with and never saw themselves inside: Pan Gu, Nü Wa, Hou Yi, Chang’E, Guanyin, Jingwei.

Then they rebuild those myths through call-and-response and circle singing, with the audience doing much of the singing. Directed by Emilio Ramos, Legendary is a solo show that refuses to leave the room alone in it.

That invitation matters. Rather than presenting mythology as something fixed and inherited, the show treats it as a living material: something an artist and an audience can question, reshape, and inhabit together.

Lions

Scott R. Sheppard and Alice Yorke, both Orchard Project Performance Lab artists from 2017, set out to write a satire about American capitalism. Then both of their fathers died, months apart, and the play became something else.

Lions is part clown show, part eulogy. It takes apart the myths their fathers told themselves about becoming great men, while asking what remains when the performance of success falls away.

From the company behind Underground Railroad Game and directed by Sarah Blush, Lions is an example of the way a project can change when life interrupts its original premise. The result is not a retreat from the comedy, but a deeper reason for it.

DeepFake

In DeepFake, you are the only person in the room.

You are the Head of Public Relations at MirrorMinds, a company preparing to launch a product that allows anyone to create fake videos that look perfectly real. You video-chat with colleagues, investigate the materials in your office, and argue your own position on what AI should be allowed to do. The launch succeeds or fails based on what you decide.

Created in part by Grace Goheen, an Orchard Project 2024 Greenhouse member, DeepFake is part puzzle room, part quiet horror story. Its most interesting special effect is the way it turns the audience’s own judgment into the central piece of the production.

Seven More Shows Worth Keeping an Eye Out For

These are not Orchard Project works. They are simply projects we loved: shows with a particular kind of theatrical nerve, invention, or generosity. If they appear near you, pay attention.

Around the World in 80 Toys

Thaddeus Phillips, eighty vintage toys, hidden cameras, and a table: together, they assemble a Georges Méliès silent film live in front of you. Created and directed with Tatiana Mallarino, with illusions by Steve Cuiffo, the piece turns simple materials into an entire moving-image universe.

The whole argument of this issue, in one hour, at ten in the morning.

HAM

Hamlet rebuilt around a pig. A grieving vegan stages a play to avenge one, and the revenge tragedy turns into an argument about what we eat.

From Hotter Project, Speakerphone Productions, and Soho Theatre, HAM uses the familiar architecture of Shakespeare to ask an unfamiliar question: what happens when our ethical convictions meet the stories we have been telling ourselves?

Rob Auton: JUPITER

An estate agent shows a client around a property on Jupiter, and the hour turns out to be about the small wonders of living here instead.

This is Rob Auton’s thirteenth Fringe hour and his second built as a narrative. The premise is cosmic; the attention is earthly. It is a reminder that an artist can make a large idea feel intimate simply by choosing the right doorway into it.

Stamptown

Zach Zucker’s late-night variety riot runs on adrenaline. The lineup changes nightly, nobody is entirely in control, and the show embraces the possibility that something might go wrong.

That instability is part of the pleasure. Stamptown understands variety performance as a shared risk: the audience arrives not just to watch a finished event, but to see what happens when a room full of performers pushes past the point of certainty.

Lou Wall: Where Are All The Tall Grandmas?

A genuine question: where are they?: chased down with multimedia and song at full volume.

Lou Wall commits to the bit well past the point most acts would let it go, which is the point. The show’s commitment turns an apparently ridiculous question into a complete theatrical world.

FORIEGNER

The Koan Brothers: Sohrab Haghverdi with Benjamin and Mason Rosenthal: make an autobiographical clown show that flatly refuses to explain itself, or Haghverdi, to you.

Rumi by way of paradox, with a title spelled wrong on purpose, FORIEGNER trusts confusion as a form of connection. It does not tidy up identity or translate every contradiction. It lets the audience sit inside the question.

Alex Edelman: What Are You Going to Do

This is Alex Edelman’s first new hour since Just for Us traveled from the Fringe to Broadway.

Seashells, an amputee hospital in Jerusalem, assorted deities, and what any of us owe each other: the material is wide-ranging, but the question is direct. What do we do with the world we have been given, and with one another inside it?

This Is What The Orchard Project Is For

A show that plays Edinburgh has usually spent years getting there, and almost none of that time is spent in front of an audience.

It is spent in rooms: rooms somebody paid for, fed, and then left alone.

That is the part we do.

For eighteen years, The Orchard Project has created the conditions for artists to experiment before a project has all the answers. In 2026 alone, more than fifty shows were worked on in our labs, thanks to an ecosystem that includes colleagues, artists, producers, and supporters.

Our Performance Lab supports new plays, musicals, and performance projects. Our Episodic Lab brings writers together to develop television, film, and audio storytelling. Across every program, the goal is the same: to give artists enough time, space, feedback, and freedom to find the work that only they can make.

So keep an eye out for these shows as they travel. Follow the artists. Look for the next version, the next city, the next room.

And if you want to help send the next one forward, support The Orchard Project. Makers gotta make. We are grateful to everyone who helps make the room possible.