Emily Steel returns to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with How Not to Make It In America, a darkly comic, deeply personal exploration of ambition, trauma, and youthful delusion set against the backdrop of 9/11. Developed with Theatre Republic and heading to Summerhall, the show draws on Steel’s own experiences of arriving in New York just weeks before the attacks.
“I started as an actor, and then I became a playwright,” Emily explains, tracing a journey that now sees them as Artistic Director of Theatre Republic as well as writer and associate director of this production. “So yeah, I’m the playwright of How Not To Make It In America. For this season, I’m the Associate Director, directing the remount.”
At its core, the piece follows a young Australian performer chasing success in New York, only for those dreams to be destabilised almost immediately. “It’s about this young, naive Australian actor, who moves to New York in the middle of 2001, and he’s been there about three weeks when the Twin Towers come down,” Emily says. “So his dream of making it as an actor over there is really thrown into chaos by what’s happened in the city.”
Despite its premise, the play resists becoming unrelentingly heavy. “Having said all of that, it’s actually quite funny,” Emily reflects. “Sometimes it makes people cry. But it makes them laugh as well. So hopefully a little bit of a roller coaster.”
That emotional duality stems from lived experience. “When I just got out of drama school, I had the slightly crazy opportunity to go to New York, and I really didn’t know what I was doing over there,” Emily admits. “I didn’t have a work visa. I didn’t know how to make any connections, and I was there for about three weeks before 9-11 happened.”
The story itself took years to emerge. “The play came from a couple of decades of trying to work out what my own reaction to that had been all about,” they say. “A lot of writers end up processing their life and the world through storytelling, and I think at the time, I’d really been in denial about what an impact that massive event had had on me.”
The aftermath of 9/11, as Emily describes it, was marked by unpredictability and impulsive choices. “There were lots of breakups, or people got married, people made big choices about their lives, because you had this sense that it could all end tomorrow,” they explain. “It’s that reflection on what it’s like to be young and naive and do really stupid things, the stupidity of youth is actually quite beautiful.”
That balance between absurdity and heartbreak defines the show’s tone. “If you look closely at pretty much any situation, there’s a level of absurdity to it,” Emily says. “People are heartbreaking and ridiculous at the same time.”
On stage, that complexity is embodied by a single performer playing dozens of roles. “He plays 28 characters, and has a lost count of the number of accents,” Emily says of actor James Smith. “What he brings to it is really extraordinary, the vocal work is amazing and precise, and he’ll just turn from one accent to another.”
Beyond voice, the transformation is physical and immediate. “Just the way he holds his body will shift you, in the tiniest millisecond, and all of a sudden he’s somebody else,” they add. “Which is a real gift, I think, as a writer, to write for somebody who can do that.”
Returning to Edinburgh feels like a full-circle moment. “I went to Edinburgh when I was very young, and I made a deal with myself that if I survived it and still wanted to be an actor, I would apply for drama school,” Emily recalls. “So bringing a play, about being a naive and unworldly young actor, back to the place where I did that myself, feels weirdly right.”
There is also the unique atmosphere of the Fringe itself. “There’s an energy to it, you go from one show to the next, and you just don’t know what you’re going to see,” they say. “Some of it’s extraordinary, and some of it’s terrible. And it’s just a really wonderful thing to be part of that.”
And as for convincing audiences to take a chance on the show? Emily has a simple starting point. “Where were you on 9-11? What do you remember about that day?” they ask. “Now imagine that you are an Australian actor, no phone, no TV, no internet, and you see this black smoke filling the sky. What’s that going to do to your dreams?”
For younger audiences, there’s another entry point entirely. “A lot of young people weren’t even born when 9-11 happened, and that kind of blows my mind,” Emily reflects. “So for them, it’s a bit of a history lesson, very much of the time.”
How Not to Make It In America is less about failure and more about what remains when certainty disappears. “It’s about resilience, and about holding on when things don’t go as planned,” Emily says.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
