The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!

As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

A fire alarm, like an air raid siren, shrieks over the black box battlefield. Performers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland look up in perfect synchronicity, as if on cue. The audience doesn’t move, having been desensitized to the sounds of war from the prior 50 minutes.

“I think that’s the actual fire alarm,” Roland says, breaking character into a nervous smile. 

The audience is then ushered outside into the misty night air. There, many still-captive audience members surround Rice and Roland and the requests come pouring in for continued entertainment: participation in a BeReal, a selfie, even to finish the show right there (of which only about 60 seconds remained when the alarm sounded).

“Please come back in and see the ending, it really ties everything together,” Roland says with earnestness. “If they let us go back in, we will finish it!” Once deemed safe by theSpace’s staff, go back we do, all of us—not a single audience member was willing to miss a single moment of this remarkable show.

Rice and Roland—a New York-based pair whose artistic expressions range from clowning and choreography, to playwriting and sound design—are two-time Fringe First winners at the Edinburgh Fringe. They first leapt onto the scene with 2022’s And Then the Rodeo Burned Down and then 2023’s What If They Ate the Baby? 

This year’s Fringe offering, A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, is hat-trick material.

READ: What is it Like to Have 2 Shows in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe?

The exquisitely choreographed memory play spans The Vietnam War, the backdrop against which Ace (Roland) and Grasshopper (Rice) sprout from seven-year-old boys playing soldiers to young men in mosquito-infested trenches. At the show’s start, Ace and Grasshopper are codifying their own manifesto of masculinity, learning as they go. Donning dirty scout uniforms sprinkled with patches, they recount the rules as they know them: to make a promise, a man must both spit and shake on it, there is nothing greater a man can be than a soldier, and never (ever) hold hands with another man (unless it’s an extreme circumstance).

Ace puts Grasshopper through a man-up boot camp. With a father at home and more brothers than he can count on his hand, almost all of whom have military background, Ace is expert on leaving boyhood behind. Grasshopper, with no family to call his own except aging grandparents, marvels at Ace's knowledge, fearlessness, and reverence to his God: President Lyndon B. Johnson. 

Johnson, a Silver Star-decorated Commander in the Second World War, had a presidential term that both began and ended bathed in blood. The 36th President was sworn in on Air Force One approximately two hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. During Johnson's six-year term, he saw the number of troops deployed in Vietnam (among whom are the fictional Ace and Grasshopper) balloon to over half a million.

The play's fevered action is punctuated by the music of The Beatles, performed cheerfully on harmonica by both Rice and Roland, and the Pledge of Allegiance, accompanied by hand gestures. The bursts of harmonica begin as charming interludes, feeling very much like an around-the-campfire moment. As the show progresses, the sharp whistle tones feel eerie. It's fun to tap your feet when the story centers on fistfuls of worms shoved into the pillowcase of grumpy head counselors. But a Beatles song seems more like an omen when gunfire begins and you ask yourself, "Does life really go on?"  

Xhloe and Natasha are performers with boundless energy. Their clowning includes collisions and cartwheels so deft you'd think they were gunning for another Boy Scout badge. The stylization lends itself to the tonal shift as the boys are deployed. If gender is a construct, a performance, then in this freewheeling show, the American ideal of masculinity as something militant is turned into a circus. A clown can be both a commander, and the butt of the joke. 

As female-presenting performers, Rice and Roland embody the boys expertly, begging the question: If one dresses like a man, talks like a man, knows the rules of boyhood so well one can not only tell them, but teach them—isn't one simply a man? In a world where an Olympian's sex is called into question, what makes a convincing performance of gender?

Despite the utterly bare stage (ok, there is a tire that's propped up and pushed around), the performers immediately transport audiences across space and time with words and heel-taps alone. You are with them. Even as the lines between "good guys" and "bad guys" blur, you are rooting for the characters and their innocence, and devastated when that innocence is inevitably lost. If the American idea of masculinity, one that equates violence with strength, makes casualties out of men, for what are young boys dying for in foreign lands? Why does one man have to die for another to be born?

As the explosive A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First asks: When is the moment a boy becomes a man? And if he does grow up, but there’s no one left alive to see it, did that boy even achieve manhood at all?

A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First runs at theSpace @Niddry St until August 24. Tickets are available here. 

See photos from A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First below.

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A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First At The Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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