Stargaze Theater Festival: outdoor plays under the stars

If you have been looking for a reason to spend a warm Austin evening outdoors, the Stargaze Theater Festival is a strong candidate. It is an annual open-air theater festival put on by the Star Bandit Foundation, an Austin-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that supports Texas artists with grants and works to keep the local arts scene lively. The festival is built around a simple, effective format: five never-before-seen short plays by emerging Austin playwrights, all performed each evening over two weekends.

The 2026 edition runs from August 13 to August 22, with performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays — August 13 through 15 and again August 20 through 22. Each show runs from 7:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., so you get the full bill in one sitting. Tickets are $25, and the money goes straight back into the Star Bandit Foundation's mission to nurture local talent and build out Austin's cultural landscape. The foundation is also part of the City of Austin's Artist Access Program, run through the Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment Department, which gives you some sense of the local backing behind it.

The venue is worth a mention on its own. The festival is held at the Dougherty Arts Center at 1110 Barton Springs Road, a place that has been calling itself the Heart of the Arts in Austin since 1978 and stands as the city's oldest community arts venue. It is an award-winning cultural arts center, and the festival makes good use of its open-air setting. If you need accessibility arrangements, the center is ADA compliant: call 512-974-3917 or Relay Texas 7-1-1 for assistance, and for a language interpreter, Austin 3-1-1 or 512-974-2000 can help.

As for what you will actually see, the festival's short plays tend to lean into the imaginative. Past editions have tackled love, memory, time travel, and mysterious nightly metamorphoses, and the 2026 bill keeps that spirit of giving emerging writers a platform to share work that might not find a home anywhere else. It is a low-stakes, high-reward way to catch a glimpse of where Austin's playwriting is headed.

If you have been to a Stargaze before, you know the drill: show up early, settle in, and let the evening carry you through five short pieces in one go. If this is your first time, it is an easy entry point into the city's theater scene, especially with the ticket money going back into the community. With the second weekend still ahead, there is plenty of room to fit a night of outdoor theater into your August plans.