ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — The 24th Asheville Fringe Arts Festival commences this week, bringing dozens of artists from all kinds of disciplines to town for a celebration of the weird, wonderful and out-of-the-box. Before the festival begins in earnest this Thursday, meet a few of the artists in our show spotlights.
Next up, Richie Schiraldi, the artist behind one-man show “The Mothman Cometh.”
“The Mothman Cometh” will be performed at 9 p.m., Saturday, March 21 and 6 p.m., Sunday, March 22 at The BeBe Theatre, 20 Commerce St. Find tickets here.
Cryptids in the dark
“The Mothman Cometh” is named for the Mothman, a winged, red-eyed creature said to stalk the hills of West Virginia.
“There were sightings of it in Chicago in 2016, 2014 to 2016, where I picked up wind of the cryptid and decided to turn it into this little creature character. That’s developed over the last four or five years from a three minute Halloween party act into a 10 minute cabaret act. I toured it around for a while and now it’s got its own full show,” Schiraldi said. “It went on a small tour last year and is gearing up for a little bit of a tour this year, and Asheville is my first stop. Which is, honestly, really cool, to play in Appalachia for the first showing of 2026.”
The show is a combination of monologue and audience engagement, complete with games and activities like “a stupid little dance.” With Mothman as his guide, Schiraldi will lead the audience through a discussion of all things dark and mysterious, on a stage literally cloaked in darkness.
“The show is basically an hour in the dark, lit by Mothman’s glowing red eyes. There’s a little bit of light throughout, because there’s a lot of audience participation in the show. I’m threatening audience participation,” Schiraldi said. “There’s some lights that come on every now and then, just to make sure, for safety, and there’s a light bulb that comes on to soothe the Mothman once in a while. But for the most part, it’s a show in the dark, and we do a bunch of games and rituals to embrace the darkness together.”
Schiraldi said that the goal of the show is to create community around the fact that we all face darkness of some kind. Whether his audience is coping with dark emotions like fear and rage or dark struggles like depression and loneliness, Schiraldi found, perhaps ironically, that the Mothman connects with people as a spooky symbol of hope.
“I’ve had people of all ages come to the show and be touched in miraculous ways,” Schiraldi shared. “Like, I’ve had a therapist come up to me after the show, just crying, and saying, you know, ‘I deal with people all day, and I didn’t know that I needed this, so thank you.’ I’ve had sisters who have come up to me, who have been arguing about how one of them is unable to be vulnerable in life, and they argued up to the point of the show starting, and then after the show, they were like, ‘I don’t even know that we’re fighting anymore.'”
What is it about the Mothman that allows such vulnerability? Schiraldi thinks it has to do with the inherent silliness of the scary character.
“There’s something about this massive, dark creature that nobody can seem to describe or convey, other than calling it the Mothman, and for these big, glowing red eyes to be floating through the space and having such an effect on people. And not just in the show, but, like, in the sightings of West Virginia and everything,” Schiraldi mused. “There’s this looming, dark, ominous presence that, of course, when you’re in the middle of it, or when it’s next to you, I’m sure it’s very terrifying. Very supernatural. But when I zoomed out a little bit, I find it quite funny.”
The relief Schiraldi discovered in making light of the dark is what powered the development of “The Mothman Cometh.”
“That has inspired a lot of the type of writing I’ve done for this show,” Schiraldi said. “Like, how can we use a scary creature and subvert his power and status with play and some stupidity, and then use that to play together, so that we make scary things not so scary? They’re a bit more approachable. The topics, the themes that we might talk about, and the creature himself.”
The show may be dark, literally and figuratively, but it has a light at its core, like those glowing red eyes in the murk.
In Schiraldi’s words, “The Mothman Cometh” is designed for those who choose to believe in darkness and magic alike.
“I think it’s for anybody who’s interested in a little bit of the strange, and the weird and the dark, and the alternative fields out there who want a little taste of magic,” Schiraldi said. “The darkness is not a scary thing, but it’s an exciting thing.”
Learn more about Schiraldi and “The Mothman Cometh” at tickets.ashevillefringe.org/events/the-mothman-cometh.