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The gutsy physical-theater duo of Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland have won three Edinburgh Fringe First Awards, and it’s no wonder. While their show A Letter To Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First lives up to its billing as “absurdist clown physical theater,” any “absurdity” in this frenzied roller coaster of boyhood bonding and imaginative adventuring comes not from fantasy but from excesses of the real.
Dressed in dirt-streaked camp or Cub Scout/Boy Scout uniforms and bedecked with paint, two boys nicknamed “Ace” and “Grasshopper” expose the deeply imagined and historically informed psyches of a particular species of 1960s kid. For these boys growing up amid the contradictions and traumas of the Vietnam War, the figure of new president Lyndon B. Johnson looms huge in their imaginations. They playact acrobatic wartime action, tell stories, practice wordplay, and sing and pledge-allegiance their hearts out.
This panoply of hyper-reality manifests in hyper-theatrical physical action. Using only a truck tire as a prop, and with some audience members seated onstage in the round, the two friends turn the Soho Playhouse stage into a one-ring circus of the mind. A thundering Beatles soundtrack alternates with the kids’ plaintive (and skilled) harmonica harmonizing.
The show whips your attention this way and that. Deep and dizzying, joyful and flecked with horror, it’s a remarkable plumbing of history and childhood. It beggars much further description. See it! A Letter To Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First is at Soho Playhouse in NYC through June 29, 2025.
