Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland have spent the month of August as a pair of aspiring rodeo cowboys faced with a bull suffering an existential crisis; as rapidly-deranging 1950s suburban housewives who eat green spaghetti with purple forks; and as 1960s boy scouts who turn into soldiers – all wearing clown makeup and rarely standing still. The New York-based duo are preternaturally energetic clowns and theater artists who this month are putting on all three shows that won them the prestigious Fringe First Awards in the previous three years. Each play is rooted in a recognizable real-life/archetypical American scenario, but takes flight physically and metaphysically (and meta-theatrically.) There is a subtle politics at play, a comment on gender norms and expectations, but the dialogue suggests several layers of meaning peeking out from beneath the tightly timed and spectacularly choreographed clowning. The plays, influenced by the Theater of the Absurd as practiced by both Beckett and Ionesco, provoke what you could call the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome: Like trying to find a word that’s just on the tip of your tongue, you reach for what these plays are trying to say, almost getting it. What’s clearer is that you’ve been entertained. All three are simply staged but with relatively high production values — well-developed sound effects, musical interludes, dramatic lighting by Angelo Sagnelli; everything else, from costumes to choreography to an electric presence, come courtesy of Xhloe and Natasha.
All three plays are being presented in the same venue (Upper Theatre at theSpace @ Niddry St.) right up to this, the last weekend of the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
And Then the Rodeo Burned Down”,
Xhloe and Natasha’s maiden effort at the Fringe, first performed in 2022, is a takedown of the ideal of American masculinity, with the two female performers portraying characters aspiring to be the quintessential American archetype, the cowboy. It’s an ideal that nobody can live up to for real. Certainly, these characters don’t. Dale is a rodeo clown who hopes someday to be a rodeo cowboy; Dilly is Dale’s shadow who hopes someday to be Dale. The characters are of ambiguous gender and sexuality; at one point they hug.
“Cowboys don’t hug,” Dale says.
“Do rodeo clowns?” Dilly asks. Later, they kiss.
More often they perform hyperactive, highly synchronized country-western activities – lassoing, smoking, digging ditches, drawing finger-guns on one another, – to a country-western score, Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” Elvis Presley’s “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” and “Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire.”
At one point, one of them turns into a full-fledged cowboy named Barnaby (I think), whom Dale asks: “What makes a cowboy?”
“Well, it’s one percent raw talent, two percent skill, good looks, and 95 percent fire.”
“What’s the other two percent?”
“Excuse me?”
“That only adds up to 98 I think.”
“Well, I guess the other two percent is putting your head down and paying your dues.”
At another point, one of them turns into a bull, named Arnold (I think), who starts talking about how they poked and burned and chased his mother, but she escaped, and he will too.
In keeping with the title, the rodeo apparently burns down offstage. Dale and Dilly try to figure out who did it – until they stop. They (or is is Xhloe and Natasha?) have run out of money.
“We can’t afford many more lines… “
“We worked so flipping hard and put our heads down for so flipping long, and all we want to do is finish a flipping story. God, I wish we had budgeted for more profanity.”
Shirley and Dotty are the epitome of the suburban housewife of the 1950s (in some ways the flip side of the would-be macho characters in Xhloe and Natashas’ “Rodeo”): well-mannered, feminine, dressed in fluffy pastel dresses and exchanging pleasantries about spaghetti casseroles and scones (“My mama taught me never to return an empty dish”) But something feels…off. What is that sound of knocking? Why don’t they answer the door rather than freezing temporarily, then going into robotic dance movies? The same scene repeats again and again, slightly more skewed each time, and you notice more and strangeness. Where are their husbands? What is the trouble they refer to? Why are their pretty dresses smeared, why is the spaghetti they eat green, and plates and utensils all purple? Again and again, they break into dance; they kiss; there are those alarming knocks on the door, and other ominous noises. What’s clear amid all the ambiguity is that the era of pastel party dresses and casserole dishes was also the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
“A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First”
Dressed in mud-splattered boy scout uniforms, and entering the stage playing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” on their harmonicas, the young boys Ace and Grasshopper are ready for manly adventures. Ace, from a military family, instructs Grasshopper, who lives with his grandparents, on how to be tough. There are rules. They can do a spit handshake, but it has to be brief. Men can’t hold hands “unless you’re really really scared,” says Grasshopper; “only in extreme situations,” they say together. They are boyishly patriotic: The title refers to their mission to see President LBJ’s train as it passes through their town. They love to pledge allegiance to the flag, although they sometimes forget the words. Xhloe and Natasha’s exhaustive repertoire of spins, jumps, flips capture the boys’ energetic innocence, and then segue into the horror when these boys have become soldiers presumably in Vietnam, although the name of the war is never mentioned, as if it could be (and has been) any of them.
I missed this show when it was in New York a few months ago. Whether it will return, Xhloe and Natasha certainly will.. Stay tuned.
