Alex Edelman’s one-man show Just For Us started at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a best-show nomination in 2018, before picking up Tony and Emmy Awards earlier this year. Now, the show is being performed at Six Points Theater in St. Paul for the first time without Edelman’s involvement.
“I first heard about this before it was even a play on stage,” said Barbara Brooks, the founder and producing artistic director of Six Points Theater, on an upcoming edition of TC Jewfolk’s Who The Folk?! Podcast. “I thought, ‘my goodness, this should be a play.’ So I tried to contact Alex Edelman, and his manager, to say, I’d love to license this material and get it on stage.”
Brooks didn’t hear from either of them – but clearly the idea had merit: the show went from off-Broadway to Broadway, to touring, and streaming on MAX.
“About 9 months or a year ago, I read that [Alex] was getting done with it. He wanted to be putting it to rest. And I thought, Okay, well, this is a story that needs to continue to be told. So I made a few calls and got in touch with the right people, and we got the license.”
The show is running Oct. 26-Nov. 10 at the Highland Park Community Center to kick off Six Points’ 30th anniversary season.
Edelman won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special and a special Tony Award for “Exemplary Debut” for the show.
Brooks said she doesn’t feel any added pressure in producing the show because it’s the first time that it’s being performed without Edelman. The casting process, however, is where she felt the pressure.
“I wanted to cast it right. That’s such an important element, especially when it’s a solo show,” she said. “When I have an actor who I’m fully confident in, and a director who’s amazing, and a production team with the ideas that they have, I’m not unrelaxed at all.”
Ryan London Levin plays Alex, and the show is directed by JC Cutler. Both have experience with Six Points Theater in the past, as well as a wealth of experience in the Twin Cities theater scene. The show is the first one-man show that Levin has carried.
“At first it was very intimidating,” said Levin, who was cast in the role two months before starting rehearsals. “I spent the summer thinking I had to get it in my head. That was intimidating knowing that I have to hold a show by myself. Then it got crazier when Alex posted on Instagram that he may come. Fear and terror make you memorize a script quickly. They are good motivators.”
Cutler understands what Levin is going through being the first non-Edelman performer in this role. Earlier in his career, Cutler was the first person to perform Eric Bogosian’s shows Drinking In America and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll in the 1990s after Bogosian stopped performing them.
“What’s nice about this script is it’s material distilled over countless performances,” said Cutler. “We know this works, word for word, moment to moment. Ryan has to play Alex, and there’s no room for interpretation.”
The advantage of Levin taking on the role, that while intimidating, Levin is an actor where Edelman is a comedian; which can give the Levin the license to play some of the characters that Edelman plays on stage to a different level.
“There are so many characters evoked: parents, friends, white nationalists. Ryan can embody them and play them all, and can do it more fully because he’s an actor,” Cutler said.
Levin said he’s at the point of the rehearsal process that the show feels right.
“We know it works,” he said. “I go out there and do my job like I’ve done before and hope for the best. The scary part was tackling the beast of it and [now], we’re in a good place.”
