A Fringe Festival is an annual, uncensored, performing arts event where anyone can register to perform, unconstrained by traditional artistic gatekeeping. These festivals are open-access, meaning performances—spanning theater, comedy, dance, cabaret, and music—are not selected by a jury, allowing for highly experimental and independent artistry.

The Hollywood Fringe Festival has infiltrated Hollywood, but the Titans have infiltrated Fringe.

This year’s festival features a handful of Cal State Fullerton alums bringing solo shows, clown shows, and choreopoems to stages across Hollywood. Each Fringer has a different story and medium. Still, the same thread runs beneath the surface: Fullerton gave them the opportunity to learn storytelling and figure out who they wanted to be on stage.

R.M. Aranda: A Hoop Alien on a Mission

R.M. Aranda went to Cal State Fullerton while in utero and spent her early childhood in the city. Her mother attended CSUF while pregnant with Aranda. This year, Aranda is back with her second Fringe show, playing a “hoop alien” sent from the Hoop planet to save the world. She confessed that the power of FOMO won out, and she returned after swearing off Fringe last year. Armed with clown makeup and a light-up hula hoop, Aranda, through improvisation, works with the audience each performance to figure out how the hoop can be used for anything other than its purpose. If you’d like to help her save the world, she is performing Hoop on June 22 at 7 pm and June 24 at 5 pm.

Reina Abravaya: Turning Loss into a Solo Show

For Reina Abravaya, it took a hysterectomy and her father’s death to push her to write the one-person show she had been putting off for a decade. The Uterus Party marks Abravaya’s Fringe debut but not her first time on stage. She performed in The Vagina Monologues during her senior year at CSUF. She credits her journalism degree for teaching her to tell her story and giving her the tools to turn something so personal into a performance audiences can enjoy. Abravaya says that, though the subject matter is heavy, her show is funny. Her next performances are on Wednesday, June 24, at 5pm and Saturday, June 27, at 10:30am.

Joe Hutcheson: Sobriety was the Missing Link

“What I learned about being an actor and a performer, I learned at Cal State Fullerton,” Joe Hutcheson said. He received his BFA in musical theater from CSUF in 2001 and flew in from New York to bring Miss Magnolia Beaumont Goes to Provincetown to Hollywood Fringe. The character started as a joke between friends and grew into a solo show that went on to appear at the New York and Cincinnati Fringe Festivals over the years. After a long break and realizing his sobriety was the missing piece to the puzzle for Miss Magnolia Beautmont, he rewrote the show. Hutcheson is offering CSUF alumni and Fullertonians a discount code “titans” (all lowercase). He has 4 performances left, running from June 21 to June 28.

Gabrielle Jackson: An Exploration of Intuition

Cal State Fullerton alumna and 2026 Hollywood Fringe Scholarship winner, Gabrielle Jackson, makes her Hollywood Fringe Festival debut with They Tend to Themselves: A Choreopoem. Jackson has crafted a piece of theater that draws from Afrofuturism and ancestral wisdom. It is a dance between spoken word, movement and music. Jackson’s Rainbow Delicious explores the reflection she fears, her own, the spaces between past and future, and what it means to exist in a world that constantly doubts her. In an Instagram post, Jackson stated, “It’s about what happens when you stop running away from yourself and your own reflection, and you allow yourself to be seen.” Jackson has two performances left: Wednesday, June 24th at 7:30pm and Sunday, June 28 at 9:15pm.

The 16th annual Hollywood Fringe Festival runs June 11th-28th and features 480+ shows and over 2,150 performances, spanning comedy, drama, immersive theater, clowning, musical theater, puppet shows, and more. It is the largest performing arts celebration in Los Angeles. It is an open-access community-derived event where anyone with a passion for performance is welcome to participate. 

Tickets can be purchased at https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/.