Subway
Aug 6-30
(16.30)
I’M MOM is a solo theatrical show written, devised & performed by Nate Wise, an actor, improviser, musician & writer from Chicago now based in Brooklyn. Wise began performing improv in 2014, studying & performing with some of New York’s best-known comedy institutions, including UCB, The Annoyance, The Armory Comedy & Magnet Theater, while also undertaking acting training at The Studio New York. He has developed a particularly interesting mixture of acting, improvisation, clowning & music – he also makes indie-pop music under the name Sky Adler.
That background is important to I’M MOM, because this isn’t simply a piece of autobiographical storytelling. It is a performance experiment built around one extraordinary challenge: can an actor use his craft to have a conversation with the mother he lost?
Wise was only 18 when his mother died of breast cancer. She was a Chicago therapist, described by Wise as brilliant, generous, artistic & almost magically capable, but she never told her family that she was dying. There was therefore no conventional goodbye, no opportunity for everyone to grieve together, & a great deal left unsaid. Years later, Wise’s own therapist suggested Gestalt therapy’s “empty chair” technique – speaking to the dead person & then responding as them. Wise initially thought, quite understandably, absolutely not. But acting changed the equation.
Wise discovered that the very tools he had spent years developing as a performer could give him a route into his mother’s voice, memories & unspoken wounds. His mother’s journals became another piece of the puzzle. What emerges is therefore part therapy session, part theatrical performance, part comedy & part séance – though thankfully one conducted through acting rather than supernatural intervention.
As show titles go, I’M MOM is certainly thought-provoking. With so many productions at the Fringe, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was genuinely humbled by what I witnessed. As a lone figure appears on stage, an eerie yet calm atmosphere takes precedence over the room. Gradually it dawns on you that this is a story about life & death – but also about the strange things we do to keep our relationships with the dead alive. And then Wise begins to shift.
I’M MOM unveils his remarkable ability to move between himself & his mother, sometimes so rapidly that the distinction between performer & character seems to dissolve. Watching him, I felt something of Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates emerging – in the best possible way. There is that same uncanny sensation of watching one person somehow become two. Wise doesn’t merely imitate his mother; he attempts to inhabit her, allowing his acting technique to become the mechanism through which the relationship can continue.
That makes his background in improvisation particularly relevant. Wise has more than a decade of improv experience across iO, Second City, UCB, Magnet & Annoyance, and his approach to performance is rooted in listening, action, honesty & finding the truth of a scene rather than simply trying to manufacture laughs. In I’M MOM, those skills are turned inward. The improviser who normally creates a character with another performer is instead creating a dialogue between himself & a person who can no longer answer. The result is surprisingly warm.
There is comedy here – Wise apparently insists that the show is funny – but the humour never feels like an attempt to disguise the grief. Instead, laughter becomes another way of approaching it. The official description calls it a collision of therapy, acting & comedy, and that feels exactly right.
Wise’s work outside the theatre also gives some context to the breadth of his performance instincts. He has worked in film, including a starring role as Mark in the 2023 comedy-horror Cannibal Mukbang, while continuing to perform improv in New York. There is something rather fitting about that mixture of comedy, horror & theatrical experimentation finding its way into I’M MOM: grief itself can be an extraordinarily strange genre.
The show has also had a life before Edinburgh, with performances in New York, Chicago & Los Angeles before Wise brought it to the Fringe. Its Edinburgh run was at Just The Tonic at Subway, where it was presented as a one-hour solo show.
For me, I’M MOM resonated personally. After experiencing major loss & grief in recent years, losing loved ones & friends to cancer, I know how devastating that absence can be. But Wise finds something important in the act of remembering: that grief isn’t necessarily something we defeat. Sometimes we learn to carry it, talk about it, laugh alongside it & perhaps even find new ways of communicating with those who are no longer here.
Nate Wise has created a remarkably intimate piece of theatre from that idea. The fascinating thing is that the person he is trying to bring back to life isn’t really his mother – it is his relationship with his mother. Acting becomes the bridge between memory & imagination, between the living & the dead.
I’M MOM is therefore much more than a conventional grief story. It is a fascinating demonstration of what a solo performer can do when the boundaries between actor, character, therapist, patient, son & mother begin to blur.
Time is often described as a great healer. I’M MOM suggests something slightly different: perhaps time doesn’t heal the wound so much as give us the tools to understand it.
A beautiful piece of theatre about moving on, but never forgetting.
Raymond Speedie
