ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) –– This week marks the 2025 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival. Meet You Should Feel Bad, one of the troupes participating in the alternative performing arts fest.
You Should Feel Bad will perform their Asheville Fringe show at 9 p.m., Friday, March 21 and 4 p.m., Sunday, March 23 at Story Parlor, 227 Haywood Road.
You Should Feel Bad, a trio of performing artists “kind of based in Atlanta,” is no stranger to Asheville Fringe. The troupe, comprised of c0-playwrights, actors and producers Tom Zhang, Adam Friedman and Kayla Ibarra, marks 2025 as their third year at the festival.
This year’s production, “Expiration Date,” follows 2023’s “How the Grinch Reversed Racism” and 2024’s “Meowderous Intent.” The shows balance quirky comic premises with insightful social commentary and emotional punch.
“The whole premise of ‘Grinch’ is that Jim Carrey’s Grinch is actually Asian-American, slash how conversations about race fall apart,” Zhang detailed.
In “Meowderous Intent,” meanwhile, “we interviewed a whole bunch of animals to see which one of them murdered Adam. Adam played the animals and the murdered professor,” Zhang summarized.
“What can I say?” quipped Friedman. “I got range.”
A You Should Feel Bad show, in fact, is all about range, from emotional whiplash to genre mashups.
“We do theater with a very interactive twist overall, usually. We jokingly call it ‘theatre of the depressed,’ so it’s theater that often starts comedic and ends tragic,” Zhang said.
“Usually some sort of experimental theater of some kind. We like to muck with genre,” Friedman agreed. “I think in all three of which we’ve done, usually about two-thirds of the way through the piece, where it sharply shifts, whatever it was. Where we get more depressed.”
In their latest, “Expiration Date,” You Should Feel Bad wanted to explore toxic relationships through the lens of a “platonic romcom.”
“Tom plays Jordan and I play Taylor, and they have just recently broken up, which happens at the top of the show, and there is this date coupon book,” Friedman teased.
A date coupon book, a staple of the thoughtful last-minute gift-giver, is a collection of “coupons” that grant the holder a free trip to the outing on the slip. “Expiration Date” is all about what would happen if an ex cashed in a coupon after breaking up with their partner.
You Should Feel Bad enlists the audience’s help in executing the dates. At a massage, the audience will create soothing relaxation noises. At an arcade, they are responsible for the pinball dings and joystick clacks. As the dates go on and the energy between Jordan and Taylor grows more toxic, the audience becomes further entangled in the relationship.
If that sounds emotionally taxing, You Should Feel Bad has your back.
“I think something that we tried to take into account a lot was, since we’re asking them to be pretty directly involved in some ways, how do we make sure the audience’s experience is as safe-ish as possible,” Zhang said. “There are a lot of people who have experience with a toxic relationship dynamic, and for some people, those have been very toxic. So, trying to be very mindful about, a), what we’re depicting onstage.”
The troupe wants the show to be less of a reminder of darkness than an experience of catharsis and empathy for the audience.
“I think we’re hoping you’ll come away and go, oh, maybe I’m gonna think about this relationship differently,” Friedman said.
Tickets for “Expiration Date” are $16 and can be found at tickets.ashevillefringe.org/events/expiration-date.