NotaBle Acts Summer Theatre Festival: A Local's Guide to Fredericton's Festival of New Plays

What NotaBle Acts actually is

Here is the thing most people miss about NotaBle Acts: the capital N and B in the name stand for New Brunswick, and that is the whole point. This is not a touring festival that parachutes in big-name shows. It is a festival of brand new plays written by people who live here, developed and staged right in Fredericton.

NotaBle Acts started in the fall of 2001 and was incorporated the following July, and it has been running a summer festival every year since. It bills itself as the only English-language theatre company in the province whose entire mandate is developing and producing new work by New Brunswick playwrights. Over the years it has put more than 200 scripts by over 100 writers in front of an audience, everything from ten-minute street pieces to full-length plays.

That focus on new work is what makes it different from most of what you see on a stage. When you buy a ticket here, you are usually watching a play that has never been produced before, sometimes one that is still being figured out. Some of it is polished. Some of it is raw and finding its feet in real time. Both are part of the deal, and honestly both are part of the appeal.

The 2026 dates and the shape of the week

The 2026 festival runs July 23 to August 1, confirmed on the official NotaBle Acts site and the City of Fredericton events calendar. That is a ten-day stretch spanning two weekends, which is how the festival has typically been scheduled: late July into the first days of August, right in the thick of Fredericton summer.

A typical festival programs somewhere in the range of 12 to 16 new plays, which sounds like a lot until you realize they come in very different sizes. Some are full evening-length mainstage productions. Some are short one-acts. Some are staged readings that run under an hour. And a handful are free outdoor pieces that last ten or fifteen minutes. So the total volume of theatre is high, but no single event asks for your whole night unless you want it to.

Because the lineup and exact showtimes are set closer to the festival, the smart move is to pull up the current schedule at nbacts.com and build your own plan. We walk through how to read that lineup near the end of this guide. If you want to see where NotaBle Acts sits among the city's other summer events, our rated Fredericton festival calendar puts it in context.

The four ways plays show up here

NotaBle Acts sorts its work into a few distinct streams, and knowing them makes the schedule far easier to navigate. The names shift slightly year to year, but the shape is consistent.

• Mainstage productions. These are the fully staged, full-length shows, usually a small handful of them across the festival. They get the most rehearsal, the most design, and a proper ticketed run. If you only go to one thing, this is the category to look at.
• One-act plays. Shorter fully staged works, often grouped together in an evening. This is a great way to sample several writers' voices in a single sitting, and it has historically been the Memorial Hall slot.
• Play Out Loud readings. Staged readings of new plays still in development. Actors read with scripts in hand, minimal staging, and the emphasis is on the words. These are lower-key and often the most interesting if you like seeing how a play gets built.
• Street theatre. Short, free, site-specific pieces performed outdoors downtown (more on those below).

The festival also runs a province-wide playwriting competition with categories for full-length and one-act plays, and winning and shortlisted scripts feed directly into what you see on stage. So the festival is not just presenting new work, it is actively soliciting and developing it. For the wider picture of who makes theatre in this city, our guide to the Fredericton theatre scene is a good companion read.

The free street theatre is the sleeper hit

If you take one thing from this guide, make it this: you do not need a ticket to experience NotaBle Acts. The street theatre stream, which the festival has run under names like Taking It To The Streets and Street Scenes, puts short original plays out in public downtown spaces where anyone walking by can stop and watch. Recent years have used the Beaverbrook Art Gallery courtyard as an outdoor stage, and pieces pop up around the downtown core.

These are free, they are short, and they are genuinely charming. You can catch one on a lunch break, on your way to the Beaverbrook, or while you are already downtown for something else. The writing is often playful and a little experimental because the outdoor, site-specific format invites it. During the 2020 pandemic summer, when indoor theatre was off the table, NotaBle Acts leaned hard into exactly this kind of outdoor and streamed programming to keep going, which tells you how central the street work is to the festival's identity.

For families or anyone who is theatre-curious but not sure they want to commit to a full evening, the street pieces are the low-stakes on-ramp. Watch one, and if it hooks you, buy a ticket to a mainstage show. If you are building a cheap summer weekend, this slots neatly alongside the rest of our free things to do in Fredericton this summer.

The venues: small rooms around downtown

NotaBle Acts is a downtown festival, and its venues are the intimate black-box and hall spaces that suit new work. You are never in a cavernous auditorium here, which is part of the charm: the actors are close, and a room of 40 to 100 people feels full and alive.

Venues used in recent festivals have included:

• The Black Box Theatre at St. Thomas University, a flexible studio space that is a natural home for new and experimental work.
• Memorial Hall on the UNB campus, historically the home for the one-act programme.
• The Charlotte Street Arts Centre, the community arts hub in the old Fredericton High School building.
• Theatre New Brunswick's Open Space Theatre.
• The Beaverbrook Art Gallery courtyard and other outdoor downtown spots for the free street pieces.

The exact roster of venues shifts a little each year, so always check the specific room for the show you want on the festival schedule. The good news is that everything sits within the compact downtown and university area, so you can realistically see a reading in one venue and a mainstage show in another on the same evening without a car. If you want to make a night of it, downtown's restaurants and pubs are all within a short walk.

Tickets versus the free stuff

Here is the honest breakdown of what costs money and what does not. The mainstage productions and one-act programmes are ticketed. The street theatre is free, no ticket, just show up. Staged readings are typically the most affordable indoor option and are sometimes offered on a pay-what-you-can basis, though this varies year to year.

NotaBle Acts is a small non-profit, so ticket prices have always been modest by theatre standards, closer to the cost of a movie than a big touring show. The festival usually offers both single tickets and some form of festival pass for people who want to see a lot. Because prices and pass options are set fresh each year, we are not going to quote a number that might be wrong by the time you read this. Check the current tickets page at nbacts.com for exact pricing, and note that intimate venues mean seating can be limited, so popular mainstage shows are worth booking ahead rather than counting on the door.

Why this one matters to Fredericton

It would be easy to walk past NotaBle Acts. It does not have the marketing budget of a music festival or the crowds of Harvest. But it punches well above its weight in the life of the city's arts community, and here is why.

New Brunswick has a real shortage of places where a local playwright can get their work in front of an audience. NotaBle Acts is the one company built entirely to fix that. Seven of its mainstage productions have been published, which is a genuinely rare achievement in Canadian theatre, and several writers who premiered work here have gone on to the National Theatre School of Canada's playwriting programme. For emerging actors, directors, and designers, the festival is a summer proving ground, a chance to work on new material with other local artists.

For an audience member, that translates into something you cannot get from a touring show: you are watching your own city's stories, written by your neighbours, tried out for the first time. Some of it will be great, some will be messy, and you get to be part of the room where a new play meets an audience for the very first time. That is a specific and underrated pleasure, and it is exactly the kind of homegrown thing worth protecting by simply showing up.

How to actually go

Planning a NotaBle Acts night is simple once you know the moves. Start at nbacts.com and open the 2026 festival lineup and calendar. Each entry tells you the stream (mainstage, one-act, reading, or street), the venue, the date, and the run time, which is everything you need to build an evening.

A few practical tips from experience:

• Pair a free piece with a ticketed one. Catch a free street show downtown in the late afternoon, grab dinner, then see a mainstage production or reading in the evening.
• Book mainstage tickets ahead. The venues are small, and a well-reviewed show can sell out. Do not assume you can walk up on closing weekend.
• Give the readings a shot. They are cheap or free, and if you like theatre at all, watching a brand new play read aloud is a genuinely cool experience.
• Parking and getting there. Everything is downtown or on campus, so metered street parking and downtown lots apply on weekdays. Evenings and weekends are easier. If you live nearby, walking or biking is the least stressful option.

Bring an open mind more than anything. You are not going to see a slick, road-tested production every time, and that is not what this festival is for. You are going to see something being made. Show up, buy a ticket or catch a free one, and enjoy being part of the reason new New Brunswick plays get written at all.