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…
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 room came apart, and she drew a conclusion she still…
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 about a year ago, before the wedding. Then she let 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…
American A**holes 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 politics, dissected from three directions. The working…
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 because they needed a singer. Improv came last, which…
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…
Brendon Lemon has been telling jokes for twenty-five years. The last three and a half he has spent learning how to fail at them properly. Born in Detroit, now based in New York, he first took a microphone in 2002. The room was Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle, the oldest club in America still run by its original owner. He arrived…