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 The Wizard of Oz. She was Munchkin Mayor, which she considered more important than Dorothy.
She moved to New York after college intending to be a serious actor. No MFA programme accepted her. So she took classes at Upright Citizens Brigade and started producing her own work. That was almost ten years ago. Love in the Time of Fifth Grade is her Fringe hour. It sets her childhood romances against her dating disasters at twenty-something. Her exes appear on screen as MS Paint drawings. She drew every one of them herself. The show ends with a Disney Channel pop song and a bejewelled costume. She sewed that herself too, and hand-set more than five thousand stars.
We caught up with Marina to talk about clogs, Sharon Stone and Microsoft Paint. We also covered the two years she spent bombing on stages made of hay.
The first live baby Jesus
Her joke answer to when she started performing is that she was four months old. The church nativity needed an infant, and her parents supplied one. She notes it is an unusually difficult credit to compete with.
The Munchkin Mayor came later, at summer camp. She was clear at the time that it outranked Dorothy. New York was supposed to follow the serious path.
I was like, me and Meryl Streep, we’re one and the same.
Then the MFA rejections arrived, all of them. She had a choice between waiting another year and making her own work. She chose the second, and has not really stopped since.
Two years of bombing in basements
She bumped into a high school classmate in the corridors of the improv school. She joined her team, and the team was not good.
It’s hard to remember the first time, because they all melt together into one big fever dream of bombing.
They rehearsed convinced they were funny. Then they performed and forgot what they were doing entirely. Her memory of the venues is very specific.
They were all in basements. They were all on stages made from hay.
She counts roughly two years of this. She also counts it as the most useful training she got.
An audience of one
One performance of this show drew a single audience member. She spent the first minutes wondering how to play an hour to one person. She came off having decided it was fine.
When I make a joke at the office and it sinks, I’m like, y’all have not even seen me at my worst.
The Fringe is a different order of exposure, and she knows it. A few weeks ago she was describing it as a roller coaster. You are hyped, then locked into the seat, then quietly asking to get off.
The ride is going to start. I’ve got to embrace the ride.
She says she has come round to being excited. The bar is down either way.
Them clogs
The first laugh that landed properly came in a college devised play. She was a Civil War era belle, admiring a man just back from Europe. There were no written lines, so she decided to add something.
He mentioned the Dutch Netherlands and how beautiful it was. She replied with two words about clogs. The room went up.
When I come back to that first laugh that really hit me inside, I always come back to them clogs.
It became her thing for the rest of the run. She still measures other laughs against it.
Fifth grade versus your twenties
The show is exactly what the title promises. It gathers her passionate love stories from before the age of ten. Then it sets them against the dating horror stories of her early twenties. The moral, she says, is that loving and losing beats never loving at all.
There has only been one hostile moment in her career so far. She was impersonating a real Texan woman in a museum piece. A man in the audience told her she did not sound Texan enough. She replied that she had taken elocution lessons, which happened to be true.
Preserving Microsoft Paint
She wanted the audience to see her primary school sweethearts. School photographs were the obvious route, but the black bar over the eyes was not. She says it makes everyone look like they went to federal prison. So she thought about what she actually had in 2003.
The family computer had no internet. It had Minesweeper, MS Paint, and her father’s six Britannica CDs. She drew then, and she draws now.
Much like Christopher Nolan trying to preserve film, I am trying to preserve the art form that is Microsoft Paint.
The intention is to drop the room straight back into the early 2000s. The medium is doing as much work as the material.
The ex with the full baby
She decided to draw the men from the horror stories too. That meant looking some of them up after a long gap. One Instagram account contained a whole family.
He had met his wife a month after their breakup. She scrolled the entire account, taking in the divergence.
He has a full human, and I am drawing him in MS Paint like a stalker.
She tells it as a joke, and it works as one. It is also the clearest statement of what the show is doing.
An anthem to being a loser
One of her closest friends gave the show its unofficial description. Di Marzo took the phrase as a compliment.
Your show is kind of an anthem to being a loser.
She agrees the material goes to dark places. Her theory of comedy is built around that exact exchange.
I believe comedy is about sharing your embarrassment and being in a community about your embarrassment.
The reward is the person who says the same thing happened to them. They would never have mentioned it, and they are grateful someone did.
School photographs help because everyone already understands them. Choosing which to use comes down to one question. Which one shows her trying hardest, and failing hardest, at the same time?
Sharon Stone and Gordon Ramsay
Her two stated inspirations sit at opposite poles. She describes them as devil and angel, then reconsiders and says both devils. What she connects to is the aggressive alpha streak in each.
What would Sharon do?
She calls Stone a guiding light and a touchstone, a woman who has been through it repeatedly. On Ramsay she is more analytical. She points out that he is scrupulously fair. Repeat mistakes get the shouting, and good work gets the congratulations.
Five thousand stars, by hand
The show closes with a Disney Channel style pop song, very Lizzie McGuire. In the film there is a costume reveal with trousers under a skirt. Di Marzo wanted to invert it.
Her father taught her to sew at twelve. Anxiety, she finds, drains out through her hands when they have a job. Then she chose fabric requiring more than five thousand bejewelled stars. Friends came over for what she calls bejewelling parties.
The result has a secondary function on the Royal Mile. She describes herself while flyering as a large pink traffic cone. You can apparently see her shining from some distance.
Half Audrey, half Kathy
There was an intense Audrey Hepburn phase in her early teens. At twelve she requested a birthday party built around Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My Fair Lady remains the one she returns to. Then college introduced her to Kathy Griffin.
Kathy says the thing out loud that you’d say to your friends but never at work.
Griffin also taught her something more technical. Watching her talk about her own family showed how to talk about family with love. That register matters, because the same jokes turn mean very fast.
Di Marzo is clear about her own method. She is a writer first, and she writes and writes until someone stops her. Then comes the painful business of memorising all of it.
Sister Pigs, and the anti-television thesis
She is an obsessive Sex and the City watcher, with it playing more or less permanently. At some point she decided this ought to be monetised. The reboot was airing, and her friends had all quit two episodes in.
She recruited a friend who had never seen the original and made her watch the reboot from the top. They arrived at a firm conclusion.
We deduced that it is anti-television.
The podcast also plays games in character, choosing what the show’s women never would. Faced with stoning a monster or entering a portal, they reason it out as Carrie. She would do neither, so the portal wins by default. Her collaborator Emily is someone she met bombing in those same basements.
A recent full Seinfeld rewatch also comes up. She finds it startling how vibrantly it still lands. She adds that she identifies with George, and is unsure that reflects well.
The parts she was scared of
Asked for her favourite section, she picks the most exposed ones. There is a sequence about her grandfather taking her bra shopping. She kept that story to herself for years.
There is also a story she was deeply embarrassed by. She remembers the day she decided to say it on stage. Letting go of it turned out to be the healing part.
Why be scared of your own story?
Her message to anyone coming is built on the same idea. There are thousands of people at the Fringe carrying an equivalent story.
Yep. I see you. I see me in you.
That recognition is the whole transaction. Everything else in the hour is delivery.
Di Marzo bombed in basements for two years, on stages built from hay. She once performed this show to an audience of one. She reports that it still beat the improv years comfortably. That is the backbone the Fringe run is built on. The material is school photographs and childhood crushes and things she hid for years. Her friend called the show an anthem to being a loser. She took that as a compliment, and she was right to. The bet is that a room of strangers recognises itself. On the evidence, it usually does.
Love in the Time of Fifth Grade plays Braw Venues at Hill Street (Muse), Venue 41. The run is 7–20 August 2026 at 14:30, and lasts sixty minutes. There is a live taping on 14 August.