Stacie Burrows has been on stage roughly as long as she has been alive. Her first credit was Old MacDonald Had a Farm at preschool. She played the black sheep, which she considers telling. Since then: theatre, improv, sketch, standup, musical comedy, solo theatre and storytelling. Her roots are in standup, in New York in the nineties. She spent about ten years in a comedy band called Mommy…
Stacy Price has been at this for at least fifteen years. She trained at Circle in the Square in New York and did plays there. Then came Los Angeles, the Groundlings, and open mics around town. She is now a member of the Actors Gang, where Tim Robbins is artistic director.
Marina di Marzo’s first stage appearance was at four months old. Her Italian immigrant parents are deeply Catholic. She played the live baby Jesus in their church nativity. She is confident nobody else can claim that credit. Her first speaking role came at summer camp, in…
Hannah Ponturo wrote 1518: The Dancing Plague first as a film, then as a play. She is also directing it, and is one of four producers. She made most of the props herself. The costumes came largely out of the actors’ own wardrobes, layered up to read as medieval. The show is a historical satire about a real outbreak of compulsive dancing in 1518. Underneath it is a love story between two…
Liz Coin grew up in Iowa and now works out of New York. Her first stage role was Drake the butler, at eleven. It was a community theatre production of Annie. The lead forgot his lines and kept calling for champagne. Coin walked on with two trays and improvised the rest. The…
Meg Millane got married in her early 30s. Five of her friends did the same within roughly the same window. She was already doing wedding-adjacent characters and sketches on stage. Bride To Be is what happened when she noticed how much material there was. She workshopped it…
Chloe Matonis plays a soldier who has travelled back from 2075. The character is called Lieutenant Love Doctor Hottie McTottie. Her mission is to end the loneliness epidemic before it takes hold. In her future, social contact has been criminalised for public safety. Boot Camp for Lonely People is the show built around that premise. It is a drill sergeant show about learning to talk to strangers.
American Assholes is three American comics on one Edinburgh bill. Danielle Slaughter, Lauren LoGiudice and Wayne Charles II share it. The show opens with a trio segment under that title. Then each of them performs an individual standup set. The through-line is identity…
Aarushi Agni was born in India and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. She moved to New York in 2016 for an MFA in writing. She has been doing standup for about eleven years. None of the jokes from her first open mic survived. She started in sketch, pulled onto an all-Asian team…
The Cat Was Raised in a Box: An Interview With Tom Nemec
August 7, 2026
Tom Nemec is sixty years old. He has been doing standup for about thirty-five years. He has been sober for thirty-six, since 1990. He was twenty-four when he stopped drinking, and started performing shortly after. By forty he had held a hundred and seventy-five different jobs.
A Cat in a Box is his first one-man play, directed by Jim Mendrinos. It is about his childhood, his family, and the…