Edinburgh Fringe Chats (#80): Jay Eddy, DRIVING IN CIRCLES

As anticipation builds for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025, we’re catching up with a range of exciting creatives preparing to bring their work to the world’s largest arts festival this August. In this series, we delve into the stories behind the shows, the inspiration driving the artists, and what audiences can expect.  Today, we’re joined by Jay Eddy to chat about their show Driving in Circles.

Can you begin by telling us about your show and what inspired it? 

Driving in Circles is a little bit confessional monologue, a little bit standup comedy, a little bit rock concert - it’s irreverent musical memoir theate! I suppose it’s simplest to say it’s inspired by my life. It’s a show about surviving childhood sexual abuse, and we get into some heavy things, but I am, deep down in my bones, a clown - I move through difficult things with laughter and an ever-present sense of the profound absurdity of life - so it’s funny, I promise. Driving is also about The Road - my lifelong love affair with old road movies and real-life road trips - and about all of the surprising revelations, brushes with death, and dreams of a better life that happen behind the wheel of a car. And I want to invite you on this road trip with me - I’ll take you to a party at a murder house, show you my sleep paralysis demon, introduce you to the big ginger cat who briefly took up residence in my car, and, finally, take you on a long ride down from New England through Appalachia to Nashville, where I eat some extremely hot chicken and fall madly in love. The music is a mashup of riot grrrl / disco / country western, I’ve called it folktronica, reviewers have called it indie rock, our creative team has sort of landed on art-pop - we’ve got something for everybody! Our sound designer calls Driving, “the best live album you’ve never heard.” And I can tell you one critic described the music as “astonishingly cool” - which, I think we can probably all agree, isn’t something you often hear about musical theater. 

What made you want to bring this work to the Fringe this year?

The work I make doesn’t fit neatly into any one box - I’m a transdisciplinary artist with a hybrid practice pulling from theater and performance art, music and sound art, film and video art, testimony and memoir, poetry and essay, installation, translation, ritual. Just this week, I’ve been creating hand-drawn animations for some of the show’s projections, programming our groove box, fiddling with guitar and vocal pedals, punching up the script. I’m a generalist, not a specialist. And it’s not always easy to find a home for that kind of work. I produced most of my earliest shows at smaller Fringe festivals back home, in Portland and New York - I mean, anything is smaller than Edinburgh. So this is a bit of returning to my roots and a bit of scaling up and taking on a new challenge, and I’m really excited - Fringe is a home for the weird, unruly, independent, idiosyncratic, surprising things you might not find anywhere else. 

How would you describe your show in three words?

Nanette meets Hedwig

What do you hope audiences take away from watching your performance?

Hope. The feeling that we really can build a better world together. Driving never lingers on violence - it’s about everything that happens in the aftershock, and how we find love and community and meaning in the hard stuff. It’s about learning how to sit with the hard stuff together. There’s a line from Arielle Angel’s essay, “Beyond Grievance,” that’s been a powerful kind of lodestar for me in creating this show: “To reach for mourning - to allow our pain to be neither repressed nor sanctified, but released - can be to trade a solipsistic victimhood for glimpses of this world-building force.” I want you to leave this show filled with a sense of our collective power to make something better.

And I want to add - I hope this show makes you want to listen to the children in your life. There’s a moment, early in Driving, where I cry out: “Lord, we don’t protect our children” - Driving deals most directly with child abuse in the context of American family-making, and when I wrote this line, I was trying to say that until we listen and respond to our children’s distress with tenderness and curiosity, we will never be able to protect them. But in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision in your country and the onslaught of anti-trans bills in mine, I’m reminded of the night I saw Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower, when Reagon asked the audience at the top of the show, “What are you all doing to protect these trans kids?” In the ongoing starvation and bombing of Palestinian children - What are we doing to protect these Palestinian kids?  In the ICE raids and brutal family separations happening in the U.S. - What are we doing to protect these immigrant kids? The list goes heartbreakingly on and on, and I hope this show makes you want to build a better world for all of its children.

What’s your top tip for surviving the Fringe?

This is my very first time at Edinburgh Fringe, so I’ll just share my general tip for surviving any intensely exciting, intensely exhausting experience - get in the ocean! Take a plunge, the colder the better, for a nice spiritual reset.

Where and when can people see your show?

We’ll be in Gilded Balloon’s new venue, Appleton Tower! You can find us in the McIntosh space, from July 30 to August 24, everyday at 13:30, except Tuesdays. You can also check out our show’s concept album, dropping on Bandcamp August 2, either to get a taste of the show before you see it live or to sing along after. 

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