THE LIGHT BETHEEN to Bring Drag and Music to Philadelphia Fringe Festival

The Light Between, a genre-defying theatrical work created and performed by Tom McCormack and PJ Casbar, will play two intimate performances as part of the 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival on Friday, September 18, at 8PM and Saturday, September 19, at 8PM at Biello Martin Studio, 148 N. 3rd Street in Old City. The September 18 performance will be open to reviewing press.

In seventy-five minutes, a drag diva takes command of the room, a magician plucks a bubble from thin air, personas are built and dismantled, and an audience gradually discovers that the show they're watching has quietly begun watching them back.

'We know that Fringe audiences come in expecting the unexpected,' says McCormack. 'We want them to constantly question what it is they're watching. We ask them to pay attention without telling them what to think about what they saw. It's all about inviting connections and discerning their own conclusions.'

Following two sold-out preview performances in New Jersey, The Light Between arrives in Philadelphia with an unusual aftereffect: audiences tend to talk less about whether they liked the show than about what happened to them while they were watching it.

Blending original songs, re-imagined classics, live piano, drag, humor, character-driven vignettes and moments that flirt with the impossible, the work explores the distance between who we are and who we pretend to be. Glamour gives way to vulnerability. Mischief finds its way into meaning. A joke opens into silence. Silence into recognition.

Just when you think you have figured it out, the show quietly becomes something other than what you thought you were watching.

'We've come to understand that the show isn't really about the stories we're telling,' says McCormack. 'It's about what begins happening in the room between people. The moment when you stop watching the show and realize the show has quietly started watching you.'

'The conversations after the show have become my favorite parts,' says Casbar. 'People don't leave talking about the same thing. One person can't stop talking about Vivian. Somebody else is still thinking about Elvis. Someone is trying to understand how Tom plucked a bubble out of thin air. Another admits they spent the last ten minutes trying to keep the audience member sitting beside them from noticing they were quietly falling apart. They all saw the same performance. Somehow, they each experienced a different evening.'

The Philadelphia engagement will take place inside Biello Martin Studio, a queer artistic salon that has long served as a gathering place for artists, musicians, writers and creative provocateurs. With only thirty seats available each night, the intentional setting allows almost no distance between performer and audience-and very little opportunity to disappear anonymously into the dark.

The audience is not asked to perform. It is invited to observe, to notice and, eventually, to recognize itself inside the work.

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