Let’s play a choose-your-own-adventure game. 

You are an ex-theater kid who now works in tech and recently discovered the community theater scene in your city. After 6 years away from the stage, you can finally perform again. You feel a high that you haven’t felt since the last time you were onstage. You are reminded how fun theater people are to hang out with. And soon, you realize - there are so many people like you who want to perform… and so many people who don’t even have performing experience but who you KNOW would love it.  You want to bring this small bit of joy in our otherwise routine lives to as many people as possible- but there aren’t enough performing opportunities where you live! So, with a few friends, you decide it’s a great idea to open up another theater company so that the community has even more chances to perform. 

The GoDown Amsterdam on a Friday Summer night: An intimate room, seating around fifteen. A ring light with a phone mounted. A bunch of blank pink notes for the audience to ask questions of Aphrodite about love and sex. Rose petals scattered on the floor, candlelight and a building anticipation to meet the mythological goddess herself. Now you can picture the setting of “Always Aphrodite”, created and performed by Lauren Maxwell and Phillip Melchers, and about to take the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2024 by storm.

In the intimate Plein Theatre, the lights go up on a hooded figure, who the audience soon discovers is the narrator of the play “She Kills Monsters”. Inspired by Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, she informs the audience that the play we are about to see tells the story of Agnes Evans, a woman who lost her entire family in a car crash. The story begins when Agnes discovers her deceased little sister’s Dungeons and Dragons notebook containing a homebrew adventure that Tilly, her sister, wrote herself.