In 2001, a man named Peter Kjenaas added a deck onto his house in Lake of the Woods. It wasn't much of a decision at the time. He needed somewhere to put his creative energy, and a stage seemed like the answer. He had spent years directing and performing in theater from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and he was, in his own words, going a little stir crazy without an outlet.
That deck is now the Mile High Theater. This week it's hosting the sixth season of the Fringe of the Woods Festival, a weekend of theater, poetry, and live music that has quietly become one of the more unusual cultural fixtures in the Southern California mountains. If you live in Frazier Park, you already know this. What you might not know is how directly the festival's existence traces back to one household deciding it needed a stage more than it needed a deck.
A Deck Becomes a Theater
Kjenaas built that stage while caring for his wife Michelle, a former actress living with Alzheimer's who requires round the clock attention. Touring or working at a traditional theater company wasn't really an option, so he brought the work home instead. The first production went up in 2021, a new play called "Wee 3 Kings." The Fringe of the Woods name followed the next year, and the festival has run every August or Labor Day weekend since, growing to this year's run, held Friday, August 14 through Monday, August 17 at the theater's address on Crable Street in Lake of the Woods, which marked its sixth consecutive season.
The lineup has grown alongside it. This year's bill included a set from musician J. Raoul Brody, who has been part of the festival since its earliest days, along with new works like "Road Plays" from the local troupe lesser mortals, "Five Doors" written and performed by Erin-Kate Whitcomb, and "Model Home," a piece by Todd Alcott performed with Lynn Odell. A Speakeasy Theatre cabaret segment and a piece called "Space Rock Opera" from Liz Eldridge rounded out an evening bill that runs closer to a small-scale fringe circuit than anything you'd expect from a stage that started as a home improvement project. Daytime hours brought an artist workshop led by lesser mortals members Roger Nieboer and Amy Brosnahan, open to anyone willing to show up and try something new.
Past seasons give a sense of the caliber the festival has managed to attract to a mountain town of a few thousand people. Genny Lim, the ninth poet laureate of San Francisco and a two-time PEN Oakland lifetime achievement recipient, performed her work here. So did Sebastian Boswell III, a performer known for feats of mentalism built on decades of study rather than sleight of hand. None of these acts needed Frazier Park to build a following. They came because a resident built them somewhere to stand.
A Week Earlier, a Very Different Kind of Weekend
Seven days before the Fringe festival opened, a much older and much less polished tradition took over Frazier Mountain Park. Fiesta Days ran its 58th consecutive year August 7 through 9, organized around the theme "Small Town America" and offering three days of games, competitions, and live entertainment with free admission throughout.
The centerpiece events are the ones that have defined the fair for decades: log-sawing matches that locals call lumberjack competitions, a tug-of-war that pulls in adults who spend the rest of the year on the sidelines, and a Saturday morning parade down through town. Justin Jones, who won the log-sawing event twice more than a decade ago, put the prize in plain terms. Winners take home a trophy and, mostly, bragging rights.
Longtime volunteer Ellen Keowencox described what keeps people coming back year after year.
"I love how it brings the entire community together. It's almost like a reunion."
That word, reunion, is doing real work. Fiesta Days isn't built to impress anyone passing through. It's built for people who already know each other, which is exactly the opposite instinct behind a festival trying to draw touring poets and mentalists to a stage on a residential street a few miles away.
The Same Small Mechanism Runs Both
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only think about these two weekends as separate items on a calendar. Neither one is run by a city arts department, a professional event promoter, or an outside production company. Fiesta Days is coordinated through community groups including the Mountain Communities Chamber of Commerce and the Mountain Memories Association, the same organization behind the Ridge Route Run Car Show and the winter Holiday Faire. The Fringe of the Woods Festival exists because Kjenaas decided a stage belonged in his backyard and then kept inviting people to fill it.
That's the actual throughline. A town this size doesn't get both a 58-year-old community fair and a nationally-attended fringe theater festival by accident, and it doesn't get them from a municipal budget line either. It gets them because individual residents decide something is worth building and then just build it. The fair runs on volunteer labor passed down across generations. The theater runs on one household's stage and a caregiver's need for a creative outlet that didn't require leaving home. Different scales, same engine.
What Else the Same Month Sends You
Beyond the two headline weekends, the town's regular cultural rhythm keeps running underneath them, mostly at a handful of familiar addresses:
- La Sierra Mexican Restaurant & Lounge on Mt. Pinos Way hosts an open mic night the first Friday of every month, a standing invitation that has nothing to do with festival season.
- Adventure Ink Bookstore & Tea Room in Pine Mountain Club runs a poetry night the first Thursday of the month, a smaller and quieter cousin to what the Fringe festival does at scale.
- Frazier Mountain Park itself, the same grounds that host Fiesta Days each August, also runs LEGO Mania at the library, a senior sack lunch program, and a regular ukulele jam session throughout the rest of the year. The park isn't a once-a-year backdrop. It's the town's actual living room.
None of this is programmed by an outside promoter either. It's the same pattern at a smaller volume: a restaurant owner keeps a mic stand in the corner, a bookstore keeps a chair circle ready once a month, a park keeps hosting whatever residents decide to organize next.
Why It's Worth Paying Attention To
If you've lived in Frazier Park for a while, you've probably been to Fiesta Days more times than you can count and maybe never made it to the Fringe of the Woods Festival, or the reverse. It's easy to treat them as belonging to different crowds. But both weekends say the same thing about the place, which is that nobody here is waiting for someone else to build the thing they want to see. A man wanted a stage, so he built one on his own property and kept it running through his wife's illness. A chamber of commerce wanted a fair to outlast the decades, so volunteers have kept it going for 58 years without needing a single professional promoter. That's not two separate stories about August in Frazier Park. It's one story, told twice.
Whether you caught either event this year or you're already circling next August on the calendar, that's the version of this town worth knowing, the one where the culture gets built by hand rather than delivered from somewhere else.
If you're curious about what else makes this stretch of Kern County work the way it does, or you're thinking through a move that touches Frazier Park or the surrounding mountain communities, Phyllis Lopez has spent decades getting to know these towns from the inside. Let's Connect.
