The review Hub - Edinburgh Fringe 2025: Who We Become – theSpace@Surgeon’s Hall, Edinburgh

Writer: Lanford Wilson / Director: Mark Cirnigliaro

As it’s relatively rare to find straightforward productions of established plays at the Fringe, this offering from New York-based Deep Flight Productions stands out from the pack. It’s actually two shows being performed on alternate days, but both feature one-act plays by Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson (1937–2011).

In The Moonshot Tape, a successful writer (Margaret Curry) visits the small town where she grew up and fields questions from a list handed to her by a high school student. This becomes a self-interview, lubricated by copious quantities of booze, which rapidly descends into a bleak rumination on the past. It’s sophisticated, funny, tragic.

Curry’s acting is so off-the-scale excellent I would recommend any of the Fringe’s up-and-coming theatre performers to check it out. She inhabits the role with complete conviction and delivers the lines as if they’ve never been said before, let alone written down. This is indeed a masterclass in collapsing the gaps that can exist between performer and role, between lines and delivery. It’s nothing short of sensational.

The second show opens with Breakfast At The Track, a vignette in which Curry gives another delicious turn alongside Geoff Stoner, as a couple with very different bio-rhythms. Stoner then gives a superb performance of the AIDS-themed play A Poster Of The Cosmos. It’s an absolute privilege to see these now rarely-performed plays being given such an impressive revival, conveniently served up in bite-size chunks.

Due to the ‘mature and intense’ themes addressed in both shows, there is a content warning on the programme for Who We Become. Do check this before watching and note that this content is not suitable for children.