📍 Three Weeks in Edinburgh

It seems to me that now more than ever there is urgency in our collective culture to connect.

Alone on stage, Susan becomes 23 characters to take the audience on her solitary walk through 540 miles of rain, resentment, and redemption. Buen Camino is a moving story of how grief can lead to surrender and ultimately to freedom.

Briggs Opera House & Shaker Bridge Theatre (White River Junction, VT) July 23

Phantom Theater (Warren, VT) July 25 & 26

Edinburgh Fringe July 30 – August 24 (not 8/11 or 18)

I’m traveling to Edinburgh at the end of July for a full, three week run of Buen Camino. I expect I will learn plenty playing back-to-back shows for an international audience at the world’s largest and oldest Fringe Festival.

My desire at Edinburgh is to get closer, as an actor, to enabling what theater can uniquely do: create an intimate encounter with the people in the seats. When theater is done well, when the actor comes to the stage fully open, telling the truest story they know how to tell, something very human happens. People connect. It’s felt in the audience, and between the audience and the actor. Energy rises, hearts open, people leave changed. In this way art saves us, over and over again.

Edinburgh, with its huge international audience and the intensity of daily performances, provides an enviable opportunity to learn how to make that intimacy happen. Every audience will be different—bringing their own worries, hopes, aggravations—and that energy will impact me. In consequence the show will be different every time. What I want to be able to learn is how to show up for each audience specifically. I want practice in removing any artifice, any shallowness, any hedging of any truth that would limit the ability of the story to connect directly with the people in that theater during that hour.

I want to devote myself with sufficient seriousness and discipline that once I am on stage and get out of the way I can trust the story to work its magic on the heart. I want to discover how to tell my story in such a way that people will want to tell their own. I want the intimacy of the setting and my own vulnerability to invite an honest conversation among us all, a conversation that starts in the theater, then spills out its doors into pubs and sidewalk benches and bedrooms.

It seems to me that now more than ever there is urgency in our collective culture to connect. Too much is breaking. Too many people are angry. Our reliance on force is unworkable. We need a better way. My belief is that art and beauty are at the heart of that better way, and that theater has a very particular capacity because of its intimacy and its necessary collaboration with the audience. Edinburgh, with audiences of people with their own pains, fears, prejudices, wounds, disappointments, and shields against vulnerability, seems like the ideal place to hone my craft.

Check out my recent interviews and show mentions:

Vermont: Vermont Arts Preview | Broadway World | interview with Lucas Bates for the Waterbury Roundabout & The Valley Reporter

Edinburgh: The Scotsman | Edinburgh News | Broadway World | conversation with Caro Moses on ThreeWeeks | interview on Theatre and Tonic