The Howler: Omaha Fringe’s Original Student Written Play

July 30th, 2025

The Omaha Fringe is a local theatre festival that aims to bring together members of the theatre community from all walks of life. Focused on uplifting smaller, up-and-coming artists as well as works in the Omaha area, the festival provides a space for fresh voices to shine. One such work featured in this year’s Omaha Fringe Festival is The Howler—a comedy that lampoons the noir detective genre through farcical storytelling.

Director Cain Ingram says, “It’s laugh-out-loud, it’s fun… I still can’t help myself from laughing at the same bits every single night. It keeps being funny.”

This noir satire was developed by playwright Ash Tointon. Tointon and Ingram are both current UNO students, making this one of the first opportunities for them to showcase their original work. “Originally, The Howler was a project for our playwriting class,” says Tointon. “It started as our pet project—we made the script longer and everything. And we just had such incredible support from our friends and classmates at UNO…”

Tointon eventually submitted the script and won the lottery to produce it for the Omaha Fringe Festival. “I didn’t know about Omaha Fringe until last year… and here we are, and I’m super excited for it,” Tointon says.

The cast consists entirely of UNO student actors: Cordarrell Spears, Seth Wichman, and Addison Franklin. Ingram praises their talents, saying, “They’re all very comedic people in general, so bringing them into one room for a comedy—it’s constantly a contest of who can do the funniest bit that we actually keep in the show. We’re all trying to one-up each other, be the funniest one. And as such, the show keeps getting funnier and funnier.”

Overall, the Omaha Fringe Festival has provided these emerging theatre artists with a space to produce and celebrate their work. The Howler will be performed on August 7th, 9th, and 10th. More information can be found at omahafringe.org or on Instagram @the_howler_at_fringe.