A new play by Philadelphia-based playwright DJ Hills about Horsegirl, a young trans woman trying to understand freedom, intimacy, family, and what it means to become yourself. Her relationship with her boyfriend Cowdaddy unfolds alongside memories of her mother, creating a story where different generations imagine freedom in very different ways.
Directed by Adil Mansoor, the production moves between intimate, almost domestic scenes and a much stranger theatrical world of transformation, fantasy, and performance. It is tender, visually bold, occasionally disorienting, and deeply interested in the question of how we construct an identity.

Our review is here.

Place: Wilma Theater
he Wilma Theater

Price: from $32

A Tony Award-winning musical built around the songs of Bob Dylan — but not a traditional jukebox musical or a biography of Dylan himself.
Written by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, the story takes place in a rundown boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, during the Great Depression, where the lives of its residents and visitors collide.
Dylan’s songs are radically rearranged and woven into the story as emotional material rather than conventional musical-theater numbers, including music from across his career.
The Arden production is a new Philadelphia staging directed by Terrence J. Nolen, opening the company’s 2026/27 season.


Venue: Arden Theatre Company
Address: 40 N 2nd St

A one-man play by Scottish writer Gary McNair about a boy, his grandfather, and a seemingly impossible bet. After winning money by betting on England to win the 1966 World Cup, the grandfather becomes convinced he understands chance — and years later makes one final wager connected to his own life.
What begins as a funny family story gradually becomes a meditation on mortality, storytelling, luck, and the myths families create about themselves. The production relies heavily on the performer and the act of telling a story directly to an audience rather than elaborate theatrical spectacle.

Venue: Inis Nua Theatre Company
Address: The Drake, 302 S Hicks St

From $30

A contemporary reimagining of the 17th-century play The Witch of Edmonton. A devil arrives in a small town offering people their deepest desires in exchange for their souls — only to discover that some residents are surprisingly willing to negotiate.
Playwright Jen Silverman turns the old story into a dark, funny examination of ambition, loneliness, power, gender, and what people believe happiness should look like. It uses the structure of an old Jacobean tragicomedy but speaks very much in a contemporary theatrical language.

Venue: Quintessence Theatre
Address: Sedgwick Theater, 7137 Germantown Ave

From $17

Ben Franklin, Ben Affleck, Benedict Arnold, Bad Bunny and other figures from completely different corners of American history and celebrity culture collide in an absurd theatrical universe. Created by Philadelphia immersive theater company Applied Mechanics, RUN BEN RUN looks at American ideas of progress, fame, success and failure by deliberately scrambling history and mythology together.
This is immersive theater rather than a conventional sit-down play. The audience shares the space with the performers as scenes, choreography, drag and historical pastiche unfold around them inside Christ Church Neighborhood House — only steps away from the actual church Benjamin Franklin attended.

Venue: Applied Mechanics
ADDRESS: Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N American St

Price from $36

UnRavelled connects the lives of two people who never met: French composer Maurice Ravel and Canadian scientist-turned-painter Anne Adams. Both developed neurological conditions that profoundly affected their relationship to language, music and visual art.
Created by soprano and neuroscientist Renée Fleming with collaborators, the performance brings together theater, live music, visual art and neuroscience. Rather than presenting a conventional narrative, it explores what happens inside the creative brain — and how changes in the brain can transform artistic expression.

PLACE: Penn Live Arts/Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
ADDRESS: 3680 Walnut St

Price from $42 regular seating found

n the 1970s, a group of women gather in an Ohio recreation center to talk about their lives, relationships, bodies, work and the possibilities opened by the women's liberation movement. Decades later, the daughter of one of those women tries to reconstruct what happened in that room and understand what became of their ambitions.
Written by Bess Wohl, Liberation moves between generations and asks what social progress actually looks like when viewed across a lifetime. It is both a historical portrait of second-wave feminism and a contemporary examination of which freedoms were achieved, which compromises followed, and which questions remain unresolved.


PLACE: Philadelphia Theatre Companys
ADDRESS: Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S Broad St

Created and performed by Priyanka Shetty, #CHARLOTTESVILLE examines the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the violence surrounding it. Shetty developed the solo work using more than 100 interviews alongside court transcripts, news reports and other documentary material.
The result sits somewhere between documentary theater, journalism and solo performance. Instead of fictionalizing the event, the piece reconstructs different voices and perspectives surrounding what happened and examines how racism, public memory, media and political language shape the way such events are understood.

PLACE: Azuka + Simpatico
ADDRESS: The Drake, 302 S Hicks St

price from $18

Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot, first performed in 1908, follows a Jewish immigrant who escapes a pogrom in Russia and comes to the United States believing that America can become a place where old ethnic and religious divisions disappear.
More than a century later, the play's idealistic vision of America sounds very different. This Philadelphia production revisits the text in a contemporary context, making its ideas about immigration, assimilation, Jewish identity and the promise of the American “melting pot” particularly interesting to reconsider today.

PLACE: Theatre Ariel + Philadelphia Artists’ Collective
ADDRESS: Arch Street Meeting House, 320 Arch St

price from $49

A psychology professor begins searching for a former student who has suddenly disappeared, setting off a story that moves through different people, places and moments in time. The play draws on questions from psychology and cognitive science to examine how people form beliefs and how certain they can ever be about what they think they know.
Written by Jonathan Spector, This Much I Know plays with memory, perception and confirmation bias while gradually connecting seemingly unrelated stories. It is structured partly like an intellectual puzzle, but underneath that structure is a more personal question: what happens when the explanations we build for ourselves stop working?

PLACE: InterAct Theatre Company at The Proscenium Theatre
ADDRESS: The Drake, 302 S Hicks St

price $200 / 2 seats

This may be the smallest-scale immersive production in Philadelphia this month: Spiritual Experience is performed for an audience of only one or two people at a time.
Created by The Private Theater, the 75-minute experience removes the usual separation between performer and spectator. Rather than watching a story from a seat in a crowd, the audience enters an intimate theatrical encounter designed specifically around their presence. With only two spectators allowed per performance, it sits somewhere between theater, ritual, installation and private performance art.

PLACE: The Private Theater
ADDRESS: 3408 Brandywine St

A group exhibition exploring folklore, superstition, dreams, monsters, and the strange space between reality and imagination. Featuring Philadelphia artists including Caitlin McCormack, Alex Eckman-Lawn, Jeremy Hush, Darla Jackson, and others.


Venue: Paradigm Gallery + Studio
Address: 12 N 3rd St

A group exhibition celebrating Philadelphia’s artist-run culture and the communities built outside traditional art institutions. Part of the Collective Futures Festival, it brings together artists connected to independent galleries, collectives, and DIY spaces.


Venue: Muse Gallery

Thirty-three artists explore the idea of resistance through sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional work. The exhibition looks at political resistance alongside more personal ways of challenging social structures and inherited systems.


Venue: Philadelphia Sculptors
Address: Art on the Ave

A two-person exhibition exploring memory and the ways our perception of the past changes over time. Abeloff and Hersh consider how familiar experiences can become altered, fragmented, or newly understood when viewed from a distance.


Venue: Elisa Abeloff + Nanci Hersh
Address: 121 N 2nd St

A group exhibition exploring the contemporary meaning of the “bohemian” spirit — artistic freedom, experimentation, unconventional lifestyles, and creative communities. The show brings together artists whose work reflects individuality and alternative ways of living and making art.

Venue: The Arts League
Address: 4226 Spruce St

A collaborative exhibition exploring the small social rituals and everyday decisions that shape our lives — from how we dress to whom we share a meal with. Its title, Tutto Passa, translates roughly as “everything passes.”

Venue: Keith Warren Greiman + Jarmel Reitz

Four artists — Amze Emmons, Rami George, Alicia Link, and Qiaira Riley — imagine possible futures for Philadelphia. Their newly commissioned works explore community, collective action, and what might need to change for alternative versions of the city to become possible.

Venue: Amze Emmons, Rami George, Alicia Link, Qiaira Riley
Address: AUTOMAT, 1400 N American St

A group exhibition featuring artists from CFEVA’s Visual Artist Fellowship program. The show brings together a range of contemporary practices and offers a snapshot of work being developed by emerging and established artists within Philadelphia’s creative community.


Venue: CFEVA fellows
Address: 3600 Market St

museum admission

The first major U.S. retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in more than 50 years brings together over 300 works, from paintings and photographs to readymades and experimental film. The exhibition traces how Duchamp radically challenged the definition of art and helped shape contemporary artistic practice.


Venue: Philadelphia Museum of Art
Address: 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy

An exhibition examining video games as an artistic medium rather than simply entertainment. It explores visual storytelling, interactive worlds, player agency, and the unusual relationship between freedom and control created by games.


Venue: Pearlstein Gallery
Address: 3401 Filbert St

A solo exhibition by artist Pragya Gupta. Chrysalis centers on ideas of transformation and transition, presenting Gupta’s work within the Annenberg Center’s visual arts program.

Venue: Pragya Gupta
Address: Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St

6–9 PM; performance 6:30–7:45 PM
$35; discounted tickets available for members and students

The Barnes stays open late for its monthly First Friday mixer, combining art, cocktails, food, live music, and after-hours access to the collection.
September features pianist, composer, and cultural scholar Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. performing Who Hears Here? 250 Years of American Song, a musical journey through American history and identity.
Come for the performance, stay for the galleries, drinks, and one of the city’s more polished art-world social nights.


Venue: Barnes Foundation
Address: 2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy., Philadelphia, PA 19130

Free
12–4 PM

A chance to meet the people behind the Philadelphia Fringe Festival before the festival officially begins.
Artists gather at Cherry Street Pier to promote their upcoming shows, with pop-up performances, roaming characters, busking, interactive activities, and plenty of opportunities to talk directly with performers and creators.
The Philadelphia Fringe Festival itself runs September 8–27, with hundreds of performances happening across the city.

Venue: Cherry Street Pier
Address: 121 N. Christopher Columbus Blvd., Philadelphia, PA 19106

One of the best places to find Philadelphia’s experimental performance and underground creative community during Fringe.
Cannonball brings together nearly 100 performances, workshops, parties, and late-night events, with major hubs at Asian Arts Initiative and Icebox Project Space.
Expect experimental theater, dance, cabaret, drag, strange workshops, artists hanging around after their shows, and events designed to keep going late into the night.

Venue: Asian Arts Initiative, Icebox Project Space + other venues

7–9 PM

The Philadelphia Museum of Art welcomes the fall season with a reception celebrating Workshop of the World, its exhibition exploring Philadelphia’s extraordinary creative output following the 1876 Centennial Exhibition.
Held on the Williams Forum Balcony, this is less of a public museum party and more of an intimate gathering of patrons, collectors, supporters, and members of Philadelphia’s art community.

Venue: Philadelphia Museum of Art — Williams Forum Balcony
Address: 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy., Philadelphia, PA 19130

6–8:30 PM
Benefit event; check FWM for ticket options

The Fabric Workshop and Museum turns 50, celebrating half a century of experimental contemporary art and its influential Artist-in-Residence program.
The anniversary Preview Party is a benefit rather than a standard exhibition opening, bringing together artists, curators, museum supporters, collectors, and Philadelphia’s contemporary-art community for a major institutional celebration.


Venue: The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Address: 1214 Arch St., Philadelphia, PA 19107

After-party 5:30–7:30 PM


During PARK(ing) DAY, teams of artists, architects, designers, and urbanists transform ordinary parking spaces across Philadelphia into temporary public spaces and installations.
After exploring the projects during the day, everyone reconvenes for the official after-party at Village of Industry & Art.
Expect drinks, snacks, designers, artists, project teams, and a showcase of the day’s creations — followed by the wonderfully absurd Golden Cone Award.

Venue: Village of Industry & Art
Address: 320 S. Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19102

Ticketed
September 18–20, 2026

One of Philadelphia’s longest-running outdoor art traditions brings 145 juried artists directly to Rittenhouse Square.
Rather than viewing work through a gallery intermediary, visitors can meet the artists themselves, talk about their process, and buy work directly from them.
Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, watercolor, mixed media, and other disciplines take over the perimeter of the park for three days.

Venue: Rittenhouse Square
ADDRESS: 18th & Walnut Sts., Philadelphia, PA 19103

10 PM
PRICE: $20 / Pay What You Can


A very Philly late-night cabaret billed as “For Philly, by Philly.”
The night mixes burlesque, drag, live singing, poetry, performance, and cabaret, followed by a dance party after the show.
If you want something less polished and more chaotic than a traditional cultural event, this is one of the strongest late-night picks of Fringe.


Venue: Under the gazebo · Bryn Mawr, Main Line
ADDRESS: 1400 N. American St., Philadelphia, PA 19122

Ticketed
6–10 PM

The official opening party for DesignPhiladelphia 2026, bringing together people working across architecture, interiors, product design, urban design, graphic design, fashion, and Philadelphia’s broader creative industries.
Part awards ceremony, part festival launch, part industry party — and one of the better September events for meeting people from Philadelphia’s architecture and design community.


Venue: Forman Arts Initiative Campus
ADDRESS: 2201 N. American St., Philadelphia, PA 19133

8 PM

Philadelphia is the only U.S. host city running a FIFA Fan Festival all 39 days of the World Cup, June 11 through July 19 at Lemon Hill in East Fairmount Park — the largest Fan Fest site of any host. Free with daily online registration and capped at 15,000 fans, it pairs giant screens broadcasting every match with live music, international cultural events, and 80-plus food and drink vendors above the Schuylkill.

Venue: Lemon Hill, East Fairmount Park
Address: 1 Lemon Hill Dr

8 PM

Four saxophones + piano + a world premiere.
PRISM Quartet joins pianist and composer Craig Taborn for the world premiere of a newly commissioned composition written by Taborn for the ensemble.
PRISM is one of America’s leading contemporary-classical saxophone quartets and has commissioned more than 400 new works, including music by seven Pulitzer Prize-winning composers.
Taborn, meanwhile, moves freely between jazz, contemporary classical music, electronics, rock, metal, and hip-hop. The result sits somewhere between a jazz concert and a contemporary-music premiere.

Venue: Solar Myth
Address: 1131 S. Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19147

Free
9 AM

Not a concert hall: a morning birdwalk with live experimental music in the landscape.
Flutist and composer Elijah J. Thomas and cellist Tom Kraines create two live musical interventions along a guided walk through Awbury Arboretum.
Thomas describes his practice as “enuff music” — music centered on Black healing and spiritual transcendence — and has worked with the International Contemporary Ensemble and programs connected to Juilliard, the New York Philharmonic, and American Composers Forum.

Venue: Awbury Arboretum
Address: 1 Awbury Rd., Philadelphia, PA 19138

PRICE: $15–25
8 PM

Bring a blanket or yoga mat, lie down, close your eyes, and listen.
Bowerbird’s Liminal States series is designed around the space between waking and sleeping, turning a concert into a deep-listening experience.
For this edition, saxophonist and composer Henry Solomon creates a sound world somewhere between jazz, ambient music, electronics, and experimental composition.
The performance takes place inside the industrial Maas Building in South Kensington.

Venue: Maas Building
ADDRESS: 1325 N. Randolph St., Philadelphia, PA 19122

Free
8 PM

On what would have been John Coltrane’s 100th birthday, one Philadelphia musical institution reimagines another.
The legendary Sun Ra Arkestra, directed by Marshall Allen, performs new arrangements of Coltrane’s music as part of Ars Nova Workshop’s COLTRANE 100 celebration.
The connections run deep: Coltrane spent crucial formative years in Philadelphia, while the Sun Ra Arkestra has been rooted in the city for decades.
A meeting of free jazz, Afrofuturism, Philadelphia history, and one of the most influential bodies of music of the 20th century.

Venue: Mandell Theater, Drexel University
Address: 3220 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

6:30 PM

A bridge between Coltrane’s legacy and contemporary experimental music.
Drummer, composer, and NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington presents Legacy of Love and Liberation, a project responding to Coltrane’s musical legacy.
The same evening features L’Rain, whose music dissolves boundaries between ambient, electronics, collage, R&B, noise, avant-pop, and experimental composition.
Less a conventional jazz tribute than an exploration of where Coltrane’s radical musical ideas can lead today.

Venue: Mandell Theater, Drexel University
ADDRESS: 3220 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

6:30 PM

One of the month's most uncompromising avant-garde jazz nights.
Philadelphia-connected free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements reimagines John Coltrane’s monumental 1965 work Ascension — one of the defining recordings of the free-jazz movement.
The evening also brings together Odean Pope, Reggie Workman, and Andrew Cyrille, three musicians with deep histories in jazz and improvised music.
For anyone interested in free jazz, political music, Black experimental music, and collective improvisation, this is a must.

Venue: Mandell Theater, Drexel University
Address: 3220 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

6 PM
$35–40

Just piano and drums — and serious deep listening.
Marilyn Crispell is one of the major avant-garde pianists of her generation, known for her work with Anthony Braxton and a practice spanning free improvisation and contemporary composition.
She is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey, whose work exists in the increasingly porous territory between jazz improvisation and contemporary classical music.
No easy-listening jazz here: this is one of September’s most concentrated and adventurous musical encounters.


PLACE: Mandell Theater, Drexel University
Venue: 3220 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104

8 PM
$15–25

On Independence Day, with America marking its 250th birthday, Lincoln Financial An unusual contemporary chamber trio built around percussion, piano, and saxophone.
Ji Hye Jung — percussion
Winston Choi — piano
Geoffrey Deibel — saxophone
The instrumentation allows Trio Nebbia to move between the precision of contemporary chamber music and the energy and unpredictability of an experimental jazz ensemble.
Bowerbird describes their musical range as stretching from delicate sound worlds to the “unbridled and radical.”

Venue: University Lutheran Church
Address: 3637 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104