[NoHo Arts District, CA] – Zombie Joe’s Underground and Razorwire Productions present Something Anxious: A Double Feature at the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
Well, this is something new! A little unusual and out of the ordinary…exactly what you might expect from Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group and its latest partner in crime, Razorwire Productions. Together, they have created two plays running together, opening first at the iconic Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre in the NoHo Arts District and then moving on to the also iconic Hollywood Fringe Festival. A double feature without the creature!
Two playwrights, two wildly different stories, and one unforgettable double feature explore family dysfunction, grief, comedy, and chaos.
Always obsessed with everything Zombie, we wondered what on earth they were up to and how it resulted in this marriage of two disparate minds!! So we asked Michael Silva and Douglas Clarke of Razorwire Productions to spill the very possibly bloody beans!
Hi there! Thanks for letting us in on your secrets. What made you decide to do Something Anxious: A Double Feature at the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival?
Both plays were born on the same weekend at Zombie Joe’s 23rd Annual 50 Hour Drive-By Festival in January of this year, but the connection between the two writers runs deeper than that. All of Michael Silva’s experience had been in film until Douglas Clarke gave him his start in theatre, casting him in his first play Soulmate, which debuted in January of 2025, and later bringing him to New York to appear in its Off-Broadway run. So they arrived at the festival as friends and colleagues, and ended up writing side by side, reading each other’s pages before locking anything in. Somewhere in the process they realized they had both, independently, written about family dynamics in some form. From there they loved the idea of pairing the plays the way classic grindhouse double features paired films, only onstage. One is a tragedy, the other a comedy (one might argue a tragic comedy). As Silva puts it, it is almost as if the typical Comedy and Tragedy masks came to life across the two. For both of them, that balance is the point, and the fundamental root of the pairing’s enjoyment for all audiences.
So, what’s the connection with the iconic Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre, and why preview the show there before taking it to the Hollywood Fringe?
Both plays were born at Zombie Joe’s, which Clarke and Silva describe as one of the most fearless theatres in Los Angeles, a place built for unfiltered, uncensored work. Neither could imagine a better place to launch the expanded versions. Previewing there lets the cast explore the expanded material in front of a warm, familiar audience before everything moves over the hill to McCadden, and it binds the Zombie Joe’s and Fringe theatre communities. Beyond that, both writers simply want to build momentum and expose the show to as much of a new audience as they can. They love these plays, their pairing, and are excited to provide everyone with an exceptional amount of depth and enjoyment.
These plays are about dysfunctional families. Finding actors who feel as if they are actually related is hard. What was your casting process with these two plays?
Neither writer cast their piece in the traditional sense. At the 50 Hour Drive-by Theatre Festival, the actors are handed to you at random, and with a single day to write, the job is to build the play around the people in your cast. In Anxious Attachment, the characters are heavily based on the acting strengths and objectives Clarke’s cast shared, and the written characters even carry the actors’ own first names. Clarke had also already acted alongside Tyler Davidson in a previous Drive-By, and alongside Leila Elihu (as well as Michael Silva) in another popular ZJU show, Toxic Vampyre, so he was also drawing on his own firsthand experience of those actors. For Something Ancient, Silva shaped the family dynamics to fit his cast, writing toward the kinds of roles the actors said they loved to play. Both shows have since been polished and expanded.
Exploring family dynamics in this more enlightened era is bold, and most of us have different levels of crazy in that regard. But were the plays based on personal experience?
For both writers, yes, though not literally. Silva believes every script is personal in some way, whether conscious or subconscious. He personally has a great relationship with his family and Something Ancient is not a resentment piece at all. Although for him, there is a certain charm to a dysfunctional, even insane family that sticks together and works things out as the world’s falling apart. Clarke’s play is invented in its events, but its emotional architecture is deeply his. He has spent real time with grief, depression, and the slow work of healing through loss, much of it in therapy and in the daily discipline of caring for himself and the people he loves. Anxious Attachment grows out of that: two brothers who share the same wound, a father who left, experienced from completely different distances. For Clarke, who only has sisters and has a good relationship with his own father, it represents an act of trying to understand himself, and of bringing that understanding to others.
The Hollywood Fringe Festival is famously and highly encouraging of experimental theatre, and so is Zombie Joe’s. Are you hoping for similar audiences, or would you like to expand your artistic reach?
Both, and both writers are walking into their first Fringe without fixed expectations. They love experimental work and genre mash-ups, and they count Zombie Joe’s and the Fringe among the best venues for it. However, they also want to reach well past the experimental crowd. Clarke deliberately set Anxious Attachment inside an ordinary American family in Savannah, not within the familiar tech world so overwhelmingly present in California, so that someone who has never thought about the way technology affects family relationships or attachment could still recognize their own relationships or their own silence from within their family home; it has landed with audiences from their elder years to their teens. As Silva sees it, the whole goal of an experiment is to make something work. He puts it simply: take artistic risks, but make something people will enjoy, and the wider the audience we can attract, the better.
Theatre is becoming the only reliable source for ‘real’ creativity. TV and film are so infected with AI it’s hard to recognise what’s real anymore. What are your thoughts on the future of theatre in L.A.?
The two come at this from opposite ends and arrive at the same place. Clarke spends his days inside the very technology his piece explores. A lifelong technologist, he is the CTO of a company building tools for entertainment and sits on the Television Academy’s Science and Technology executive committee, so his conviction about theatre comes from inside the industry rather than from a distance. Because he helps build this tech, he understands exactly what it can and cannot do, and that is what makes him so certain about the importance of theatre. A live performance is the one place left where the risk is completely real. An actor can genuinely fail, an audience can be truly moved, and all in the room can be vulnerable in a way that costs them something in the moment. Technology like AI can reproduce the appearance of that, but there is nothing “living” behind it and nothing genuinely at stake. Silva, whose first love is film but who has done thirteen stage productions in the last year, says the same thing from the actor’s side: there are no stakes, risk or human vulnerability in an AI character, and that live human experience is irreplaceable. “Besides, this is Tinseltown, a city filled with artists, even your chiropractor is probably an actor (I guess that’s why it’s spelled that way).” Both are genuinely optimistic about live theatre, in L.A. and everywhere else. As more of what we consume becomes synthetic and frictionless, the hunger for something undeniably human only grows. Theatre is the last frontier where that human connection cannot be denied.
“Theatre is the last frontier where that human connection cannot be denied.”
I may never look at a chiropractor the same way again…Amazing! Thank you. Please tell us anything else about Something Anxious: A Double Feature to inspire people to come and see them.
Two fresh plays, two intense worlds, one total hour, no intermission. Anxious Attachment has us face our most vulnerable relationships; a story about relationships, loneliness, and the strange new comfort so many of us reach for instead of each other. Something Ancient detonates right next to it and refuses to let you take a breath; an insane, apocalyptic comedy full of spies, chaos, and laughs you do not see coming. One makes the soul ache, the other makes the belly ache with laughter and maybe a little guilt. Both were born in fifty hours at Zombie Joe’s and sharpened further for this run. It is theatre made by two experimental writer friends who love what they do, two stories about the insanity of family. And by the way, there’s something here for the whole family( as long as the whole family is over 18).
Thank you so much, Michael and Douglas. We wish you every success at Zombie Joe’s and Hollywood Fringe and hope you are able to enjoy every aspect of this incredible annual and ever-expanding festival.
Something Anxious is running in June at two venues, Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre, and and McCadden Place Theatre:during the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
What:
Something Anxious: A Double Feature
Anxious Attachment – written and directed by Douglas Clarke
Something Ancient – written and directed by Michael Silva
When and Where:
Previews June 4–7
at Zombie Joe’s Underground: 4850 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601
June 12–28
at Hollywood Fringe Festival McCadden Place Theatre: 1157 N McCadden Place, Los Angeles, CA 90038
Tickets:
https://anxiousattachment.soulmateofficial.com/somethinganxious