Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Kate, Allie, and the ’86 Mets
Kate Barry
Genre: Autobiography, LGBTQ+, Solo Performance, Spoken Word, Storytelling
Venue: Ruby at Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The story of two recently divorced best friends who, inspired by the hit sitcom Kate and Allie, move their families into one Long Island household in the summer of 1986. Piecing together an intricate story through the timeline of her own life, eldest daughter Kate Barry shares a tale of family and co-parenting to reveal an unexpected discovery of true love.
Review
The audience first meets Kate Barry in the queue. She says hello with an easy warmth and gentleness that will ground her hour of storytelling and informs us that the sound system took a little extra time to get going tonight. Once in our seats, she ‘lets us vibe’ to Whitney Houston before making her way to the stage. We do vibe. There are family albums left on the rows and a lot of shoulders shimmy as people mouth the words of How Will I Know to each other, flicking through photos of the blended family that we’ll spend the next hour getting to know. Once on stage, Barry, a writer and experienced documentary producer from New York, says she’s never performed before. She didn’t know if this was a story she would ever be able to tell. She thinks she’s found a way.
This reviewer knows nothing of Kate, Allie, the Mets or the year 1986. Don’t worry, Barry will explain. This evening I am in an audience largely of Americans (including some Mets fans) and people who remember the sitcom Kate & Allie. They enjoy the revisit and I enjoy being caught up. There are novelty 80s phones to smile at, a projector to cue the family occasion, matching sweaters, Christmas cards that hold clues. The title captures the touchstones of this story: there was a year when the New York Mets were briefly brilliant at baseball, and it was the time when eight-year-old Kate, her brother and her single mum, Grace, had a ball hanging out with another single mum, Dorothy, and her two kids, and the parents decided to blend their families. ‘Like Kate & Allie’ became a refrain, a way of framing an unusual arrangement that made so much sense, one that got them featured in the local newspaper in the 1990s.
Barry is here to tell another, parallel, story – one of revisiting memory, the excavation process that comes with a gradual, unfolding realisation, the shifting of family foundations, and first seeing truth in the open. It’s about a path to queer acceptance that remains ongoing. Barry skilfully tells a complete story start-to-end whilst allowing for it not to be quite finished at all. A clever thing happens as her easel cards begin in Summer 1986 and move to Brooklyn 2022 – the beginning shows itself to be uncertain, the past turned over and mentally reconfigured. In turn, Barry’s words on this stage are themselves subtly affecting the future. Time shrinks and stretches across this unscripted and unmic-ed hour, which is always simple and unaffected in style. Barry’s experience in film and newness to performance creates something honest, assured, and beautifully tender on the stage. She’s working out how to perform as her family is working out how to define themselves.
The emotional pitch is perfect. There is great care and thoughtfulness apparent for all players in this true story. Fear, trust, shame, and anger all sit as themes without the need to name everything explicitly. You well up when Barry does. You’re there with her for the moments she remembers first piecing together new information – in a therapist’s office, on a family cruise, at dinner with her mum. You get to know her community enough to wonder how they will react. You sit with the power of a secret – that balance between an individual’s right to privacy, and the wider ripple outwards from that decision. And you feel the relief brought by truth and acceptance.
Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now plays us out and Barry eases away from her storytelling by swapping some Mets chat with the other Americans (some audience members think their chances are looking better again just now) and sharing a little more with the people who have hung around. I come away warm and teary, wanting to chat and also savouring the quiet the show gave me like a gift. It’s a gorgeous way to spend an hour. I listen to Whitney Houston again. And I know more about the year the New York Mets won something now.
