Xhloe and Natasha on the Fringe

When Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland, a theatrical clown duo who perform as Xhloe and Natasha, packed up a duffel bag and traveled to Scotland to perform for the first time at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, they were barely able to scrape together the money for the trip and didn’t know what to expect.

They had been putting together their own shows since they were co-presidents of the drama club at Edgewood High School back in Baltimore, Maryland, then spent their college years in New York putting their plays on Off-Off Broadway, “begging people to come see us,” without great success.

“We decided we needed to go to the largest arts festival in the world,” Natasha says.

“It was: Go big or go home,” says Xhloe, who had never been outside the United States before.

They had so much trouble just paying their way that they incorporated their financial struggle into their play. And Then the Rodeo Burned Down features two characters of ambiguous gender and sexuality—a rodeo clown and the clown’s shadow. They aspire to be rodeo cowboys but haven’t gotten there yet when the rodeo burns down offstage. While trying to figure out who committed the arson, they suddenly stop. “We can’t afford many more lines,” one says. The other replies, “We worked so flipping hard and put our heads down for so flipping long, and all we want to do is finish a flipping story. God, I wish we had budgeted for more profanity.”

Their first goal for the production was simply to make sure there were at least four people in the audience, because they were performing in the round. They were excited when, in the first few days, they got as many as twelve.

Then, something unexpected happened. They got the very first review of their careers from The Scotsman, which gave the show four stars. This led to their winning the Fringe First Award, given out annually since 1973 by the newspaper and the University of Edinburgh. “It was a complete surprise that we won the award. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know it was a big deal,” Xhloe says. But it is: Two hours after the award was announced, the rest of their ten-day run was completely sold out. Their venue operator, theSpaceUK, wanted to extend their run. But Xhloe and Natasha couldn’t afford to change the plane tickets to stay.

TheSpaceUK asked them to come back the next year and offered to help them with housing and upfront expenses. They returned for the full month with a new play, What If They Ate the Baby, a horror story about paranoia and surveillance focused on two 1950s suburban American housewives; it too won a Fringe First Award and sold out. They returned the following year with A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, about two boy scouts who turn into soldiers. Again, the show sold out and won a Fringe First Award.

This was reportedly an unprecedented achievement—the first time in the seventy-eight-year history of the festival that any theatre company had won Fringe First Awards three years in a row for their first three shows.

They came back for a fourth year this summer, performing all three of their previous shows. Their faces were now on billboards and local magazine covers. They were in demand as Masters of Ceremonies, and their public Q-and-A session, "Xhloe and Natasha's Fringe Experience and How to Learn From it,” was well attended. Many fellow theatre artists also sought them out privately for advice.

Despite all their popularity, the truth is, each year Xhloe and Natasha go into debt to perform at the Fringe. That hasn’t changed. “We hope we can pay off our debts and walk away even this year,” Xhloe told me.

*****

Xhloe and Natasha were meeting with me in the Black Medicine Coffee Shop, the sort of eatery where people nurse their thick ceramic mugs and hang out with their laptops, a friendly, bohemian kind of place a couple of blocks from the venue theSpace @ Niddry Street, where they were performing on a hectic schedule. By the time we met, I had seen all three of their shows and understood their appeal. In my review, I observed that each play is full of tightly timed and spectacularly choreographed clowning, rooted in a recognizable real-life/archetypical American scenario but taking flight physically and metaphysically (and meta-theatrically). There is a subtle politics at play, a comment on gender norms and expectations, among the several layers of meaning peeking out from beneath the clowning. The plays, influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd as practiced by both Beckett and Ionesco, provoke what you could call the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome: Like trying to find a word that’s just on the tip of your tongue, you reach for what these plays are trying to say, almost getting it. What’s clearer is that you’ve been entertained.

It’s no disparagement of their talent or the quality of their shows to judge what they’ve achieved at the Fringe, in the grand scheme of things, as only a qualified success. Still, even that is highly unusual and hard won. Xhloe told me:

The main question that we get is the hardest one to answer, which is, “How did you do it? What's your secret?” And unfortunately, there's no secret. A little bit of luck and a lot of hard work. They ask how we got so much visibility. That’s the hardest thing, to get enough people looking at you. To be honest, it took all four of these years to get to this point.

The numbers, the expense, and almost everything else about the Edinburgh Festival Fringe can be overwhelming.

The central challenge of the Edinburgh festival is its scale. The theatre where Xhloe and Natasha were performing has been their theatrical home in Edinburgh every year since they first arrived in 2022. For eleven months each year it’s a hotel conference room. But in August, it became one of the 301 venues that by the end of the festival had presented 3,893 shows—a total of 53,942 performances—from artists representing 62 countries. This apparently doesn’t even count the 320 street performers, buskers, and street artists arrayed along the Royal Mile, the wide cobbled road between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

What’s also big is the cost. It’s increasingly expensive even just to find accommodations in Edinburgh in August. This is true for performers and theatergoers alike, which was the main reason that the Edinburgh Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester cited for this year’s flat ticket sales—2.6 million sold, below the peak of three million in 2019. Add to that the prohibitive cost of putting on a show. The Fringe Society is trying to help: This year, it began disbursing $2,500 grants to theatre artists from the United States from a Keep It Fringe US fund. But the fund is so far too small to benefit more than a handful of applicants.

The numbers, the expense, and almost everything else about the Edinburgh Festival Fringe can be overwhelming, intimidating, especially for first-time Fringers, something that the Fringe also seems to acknowledge officially: Seeking help in getting publicity for his show, one first-timer told me, “I went to the Fringe Artists Office to ask for advice on what to do, and they gave me a suicide prevention/mental health leaflet.” (But they also gave him my email address.)

This was my first time at Edinburgh too. I was one, I’m told, of 1,090 accredited journalists this year.

I found Fringe both exhilarating and exhausting. I felt that I either did too little or too much. In the ten days I was there, I was able to see or sample more than sixty shows of a wide variety (“sample,” because four of the major venue operators—Underbelly, Pleasance, Gilded Balloon, and TheSpaceUK—invited me to press previews that presented excerpts of a small selection from their hundreds of shows). But I didn’t have the time or the energy to write as many reviews as I felt I could have.

“Yes, exciting and exhausting seems to be what everyone feels from the festival,” Peter Michael Marino told me. Marino, a New York-based producer and performer who has been going to the Fringe since 2012, runs a “USA to Edinburgh Fringe” Facebook page and holds a meetup at the Pear Tree bar in Edinburgh for “Yanks” each summer. He estimates there are at least five hundred United States-based theatre companies that attend each year.

If I’m new to Edinburgh, I am not new to Fringe. I had covered the annual New York International Fringe Festival for each of the twenty-two years that it existed, one of the many fringe festivals throughout the world that were inspired by, and largely modeled after, the one that started it all in Edinburgh. And rereading my overall take on the New York festival, which I wrote for HowlRound in 2014 (five years before the end of FringeNYC), I was struck by two similarities with the far larger and longer-lasting one. In the same way that many theatre artists and companies in New York aspired to be “the next Urinetown”—the only musical that originated at the New York Fringe to make it to Broadway—so, many theatre artists and companies now go to Edinburgh with the dream of being the “next Six,” a musical that originated at Edinburgh that is currently a hit on Broadway, or the “next Baby Reindeer,” Richard Gadd’s one-man show at the Fringe that was developed into a hit series on Netflix, or the “next Fleabag,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s solo show, which won the Fringe First Award in 2013 and was developed into a popular series on the BBC and Amazon.

Closely aligned with that similarity is a comment that the monologuist Mike Daisey made in response to my 2014 article. For artists, the Fringe, he said, “is usually a loser’s game…Every year hundreds strain and strive and die in the Fringe grinder. And a few rise out of it.”

Putting on a show at the Fringe is valuable in itself as an artistic practice—the practice of making your own work and forcing yourself to show it to people.

I mentioned Mike Daisey’s harsh comment to Xhloe and Natasha. They nodded. What the organizers of the Edinburgh Fringe would like you to believe, Xhloe said, “is that you can come to the Fringe, and you can have a breakout success, and you can make loads of money, and you can get a Netflix series or whatever. That's a great image. But I think it is important to express to artists how rare that is.”

“I think there's a lot that is unfair to young and broke and emerging artists about these festivals,” Natasha says. “The systems are set up to benefit people that have more financial resources. But on the flip side, this is one of the most culturally and artistically rich experiences that we get in our lives.”

When first-time (or would-be) Fringers ask them how to prepare for a Fringe debut, “the big thing we say is: Manage your expectations,” Xhloe says:

If you are expecting to sell out your first year, expecting to make a profit, you are going to be disappointed. But if you come to Fringe hoping to maybe get your first review or connect with new artists or expand your network, then you can have a great time. Putting on a show at the Fringe is valuable in itself as an artistic practice—the practice of making your own work and forcing yourself to show it to people.

Xhloe and Natasha’s first Fringe experience was of great artistic value to them even before they arrived.

They knew what venue they were going to perform in and knew it was going to be staged in the round. So they wrote And then the Rodeo Burned Down with that specific venue in mind. “All of our previous shows were physical,” Natasha says, “but this definitely unlocked a certain level of our physicality that we had never done before. And we’ve been pushing it ever since.”

Once their first show got the prestigious award, they were strategic. They made sure to bring back that first show and create a second show to accompany it, and then they brought back that second show and created a third show to accompany the second one in their third year. “Writing a new show every year, building an entire world from the ground up, is a lot of work.” When all three won Fringe Firsts, they took all three back this year. It took tremendous energy and discipline: “It's stretching. It's icing. It's ibuprofen and getting enough sleep, so not going out and partying after the shows. Neither of us has seen a single show or had a single drink,” Xhloe says. “There is something to be said about there being two of us; If I was doing this alone, I probably would be dead by now,” Natasha says. “And in addition, and this is a very clown thing, the audience is a massive source of energy: When an audience is locked in with us, I am eating their energy to continue going.”

They needed their energy for more than just their actual performances. Despite their awards, they didn’t expect—and didn’t get—what they call “the Broadway treatment”:

It’s very physically and logistically difficult. You have to load in your own show quickly and break down your whole show and get out of the room fast. Your accommodations might not be the best situation to get into costume. You have to walk down the streets in your costumes.

All this energy, strategy, and effort has paid off—not literally, not yet, but in momentum and attention.

It’s enabled them to go on tour elsewhere in Europe. But other than a brief run Off-Broadway for A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads this First, it hasn’t made much difference back home.

“We have a huge goal of making a little bit more of a name for ourselves in New York City,” Xhloe says. “We love Fringe. We just want our shows to have bigger lives. We don’t want them to be trapped at Fringe.”