Detailed information on performance times and tickets for the shows listed below can be found at the FringeNYC handy guide.

Dirt, a “haunting” one-man drama about prejudice against foreigners, receives its New York premiere. It’s all about Sad, an illegal immigrant from Iraq, who sells roses on the streets to make ends meet. Playwright Robert Schneider was awarded Best New Playwright by some big-time Kraut theater magazine, so this seems like the one to take your clove-smoking, nihilist girlfriend to see.

Champ: A Space Opera, features a seven-piece band led by Jeff Curtin and Juan Pieczanski (two dudes familiar to fans of the PlumTV show Juan’s Basement) and is set on a spaceship carrying the last remnants of the human race. When a mysterious signal is intercepted, “space rock” ensues. With choreography by Mark Morris dancer (and Fischerspooner collaborator) John Heginbotham, plus far out video projections mined from old view-master slides and B-movies.

We have an obsession with hot-air balloons, but with autumnal Hudson Valley rides starting at $350 an hour, it looks we’re going to have to settle for An Air Balloon Across Antarctica, brought to us by Australia’s Invisible Theatre. As a female explorer longs to escape her world of white without boundaries, she’s joined by “an obese hamster who dreams of becoming a lemming, the spirits of several Antarctic explorers, a lost Amelia Earhart and one urn.”

Avant-garde performance blog Culturebot saw and recommends the multimedia show Bucharest Calling, by Romanian company Monday Theater at Green Hours. Performed in English, it casts a penetrating look on life in Bucharest 17 years after the fall of communism. If Culturebot says “cool”, we say go.

With The Times of London calling Brit import Pigeon Man Apocalypse “raw, livid and utterly mesmeric", this black comedy seems as close to a sure thing as you can get. A hit at The Edinburgh Fringe Fest, the one-many play concerns one Arthur Cork, who holds forth in an abandoned London squat where he lives on pigeons and rainwater. Then a family moves in next door and “demons awake”!

Inspired by the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the musical comedy The Medicine Show conjures up that old-timey milieu of traveling snake oil salesmen. The unctuous Dr. Boggs is supported in his sales mission by Hannah – the show’s main attraction for her remarkable birthmark on her face – guitar man Nate and Dark Cloud, “the Chief who sees all.”

Rude Mechanicals is represented in the Fringe by Managing Director Corey Patrick. His comedy bombs in your mouth concerns estranged half-siblings Danny and Lilly, who reunite for fisticuffs, Jell-O and beer in the wake of their abusive father’s death. Fun fact: The play was developed on 8th Street in the former apartment of Jimi Hendrix, so maybe his spirit will set something ablaze.