BOTTOMS UP! to Bring FRIGID Nightcap to Under St. Marks

FRIGID Nightcap will return to Under St. Marks on Wednesday, September 16 at 9:30 PM with BOTTOMS UP!, an exuberant new edition built around one simple proposition: the people at the bottom are the people holding everything up.

Part toast, part dirty joke, and part political argument, BOTTOMS UP! takes its title in every possible direction. The evening explores bottoms and booze, labor and class, sex and power, falling down and rising up, inverted hierarchies and the possibility of building political and cultural power from ordinary people upward.

At a moment when wealth, authority, surveillance and decision-making increasingly concentrate at the top, the theme asks what happens when the hierarchy flips. Rather than treating working-class politics as separate from questions of race, gender, immigration, sexuality or bodily autonomy, BOTTOMS UP! embraces a working class that is already queer, trans, immigrant, multiracial, religious, secular, urban, rural and gloriously contradictory.

But, as always, Nightcap makes the argument through a party rather than a symposium.

This month's show will be guest-hosted by comedian, actor and producer Meg Millane, returning to Nightcap after a previous appearance on the show. Millane recently brought her high-energy, character-driven solo comedy Bride To Be to the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and is taking the production to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival this September. Her work has also been seen regularly at The Stand as part of Knockouts Comedy.

The Featured Lineup Includes:

Geoffrey de Bourbon brings danger, storytelling and sideshow magic together as a self-described 'drunken mentalist,' recounting a favorite drunk story while working with cards, glass and a little questionable judgment.

Saturnalia - a '2x Yale School of Drama reject turned New England's Favorite Rack' - takes on the world's oldest profession through burlesque and Dolly Parton's arrangement of 'House of the Rising Sun.' The performance considers sex work not as punchline or abstraction, but as labor: one of the many ways people sustain themselves and make ends meet.

Kailey Strafford brings stand-up comedy rooted in queer relationships, grief, sexuality, and anxiety. A Brooklyn-based queer comedian, Strafford specializes in finding humor in darkness and laughter in unexpected places.

Nightcap regulars The Strange Girlzz also return with another original performance, continuing their ongoing presence as one of the show's most unpredictable theatrical fixtures.

The evening will additionally feature OpenStage, Nightcap's recurring discovery platform giving artists a short-form opportunity to bring new, unfinished, experimental, or otherwise unexpected work into the room.

'BOTTOMS UP! starts from the idea that the people doing the actual work of keeping society functioning should have real power over the society they sustain,' says producer Edward Gibbons-Brown. 'But the point isn't to turn Nightcap into a political meeting. The politics and the party are contained in the same joke. You can respond to this theme through labor organizing-or through an excellent ass. Ideally, we'll get both.'

The September edition builds on Nightcap's ongoing use of monthly themes as wide-open creative provocations rather than strict programming mandates. Artists may approach BOTTOMS UP! politically, personally, erotically, physically, musically, comedically, or completely absurdly.

Don't Miss a Off-Off-Broadway News Story
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...