Arizona Theatre Matters to Present Inaugural Glendale International Fringe Festival

Arizona Theatre Matters is looking both backward and forward as the company prepares for one of the largest undertakings in its history: the inaugural Glendale International Fringe Festival, scheduled for February 12–28, 2027.

Founded in Tucson in 2012 as Universal Access Productions, the nonprofit theatre company changed its name to Arizona Theatre Matters in 2018. Over the years, its work has moved through traditional live performance, experimental digital theatre, audio-based performance, sign-language performance, captioning, audio description, and other forms developed around the needs and possibilities of individual productions.

What has remained constant, says Founding Artistic Director Jeanmarie Simpson, is a curiosity about what theatre can become when artists are not asked to conform to a single way of making or experiencing it.

'We keep coming back to the same question: What becomes possible when we stop deciding in advance what theatre is supposed to look like?' Simpson said. 'Our hope is to create work that could exist only because of the particular artists making it, and then send that question outward. What could exist only because of you?'

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Arizona Theatre Matters expanded substantially into digital production. Rather than treating online performance as a substitute for live theatre, the company began exploring it as a theatrical form of its own.

Those productions have brought together actors, Deaf performers, sound designers, captioners, composers and other artists working across multiple modes of performance. Artists who have appeared in Arizona Theatre Matters productions include the late Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh, along with Lynne Griffin, Elizabeth Saunders, Mackenzie Gray, Sean Sullivan and Dylan Kussman.

Among the company's digital projects was a 2023 production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, featuring Welsh as First Voice and Captain Cat. The company later produced Simpson's When Churchyards Yawn, an afterlife comedy built from the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and continued developing original digital work combining performance, sound and visual storytelling.

Arizona Theatre Matters has also worked to develop emerging artists and theatre practitioners. Through the Shakespeare in American Communities apprenticeship program, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest, the company hosted an audio-production apprenticeship involving recording, Foley, editing, composition and sound design.

Now, much of the company's attention is turning toward Glendale.

In February 2027, Arizona Theatre Matters will produce the first Glendale International Fringe Festival, a 17-day festival featuring six productions and 50 free performances. The festival is planned for Glendale Main Library and Foothills Library, with digital participation also incorporated into the event.

The lineup brings together Arizona artists, visiting performers, solo work, comedy, theatre, movement and unconventional performance. Announced productions include Kristin Joy Moran's Futakuchi Onna, Jesse Bradley-Amore's How I Learned [NOT] to Drive, Simpson's On Track, performed by Mathew Zimmerer, Wolfe Bowart and Xochitl Martinez's The WoBo Show, work by the Arizona sketch-comedy ensemble Sketchy Women, and a production by Glendale-based Brelby Productions.

All festival performances will be free.

For Simpson, GIFF is not simply a new event. It represents a larger ambition for the company's future.

'We want Glendale to become a place where artists can try something they might not be able to try anywhere else,' she said. 'Not because the work fits neatly into a category, but because it doesn't. Fringe theatre has always made room for risk, experiment and surprise. We want to build a festival where those things are not side effects. They are the point.'

Arizona Theatre Matters also intends to continue developing digital work alongside its live programming rather than treating the two forms as competitors.

'The future we're interested in is not live theatre versus digital theatre,' Simpson said. 'It is a much bigger theatre ecology. A performance might happen in a library, on a screen, through headphones, through sign language, in a room full of people or in someone's home hundreds of miles away. The form should serve the work, not the other way around.'

As the company approaches its next phase, its aspirations extend beyond individual productions.

Arizona Theatre Matters hopes to continue developing new theatrical forms, creating opportunities for artists whose work may not fit conventional producing structures, expanding the Glendale International Fringe Festival, and building projects that encourage other artists and audiences to imagine possibilities of their own.

'We are not interested in arriving at a final model and declaring that we have figured theatre out,' Simpson said. 'That would be terribly dull. We want to keep opening doors we didn't know were there.'

About Arizona Theatre Matters

Founded in Tucson in 2012 as Universal Access Productions and renamed Arizona Theatre Matters in 2018, Arizona Theatre Matters is a nonprofit theatre company now based in Glendale, Arizona. The company develops live and digital theatre through a range of artistic forms and production practices. Its work has included classical adaptations, new plays, audio theatre, digital performance, sign-language performance, captioning, audio description, artist apprenticeships and public programming.

Arizona Theatre Matters is the producer of the Glendale International Fringe Festival, scheduled for February 12–28, 2027.