Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Picking Up Stones: An American Jew Wakes to a Nightmare
Sandra Laub
Genre: New Writing, Solo Performance
Venue: TheSpace
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
In a beautifully-written solo performance, Laub unflinchingly confronts the aftermath of the October 7th massacre in Israel. The show is challenging, but offers enormous depth, dignity, and, preciously, hope.
Review
This is the least standard review that I am likely to write for the 2025 Fringe, so please bear with me as I lay out a few points in an unusual way.
The first is that Picking Up Stones: An American Jew Wakes to a Nightmare only arguably falls within the definition of theatre at all. Writer and performer Sandra Laub makes an effort to present different personas with her shifting perspectives, but these enliven her monologue rather than take it into the territory of multi-voiced drama.
Her use of props – the physical stones, per the title, which are variously used to stand in for the two lands, for emotions, a mobile phone, devastation, and more – can be more distracting than helpful, though the metaphor of stones is put to haunting use within a script packed with pithy, memorable lines. Yet, in all: the project still feels more like a TED talk than a dramatic work.
The second is that, even taken as TED talk or cri de coeur essay, you won’t find a systematically-presented analysis here, historical or otherwise. Rather, it is an impressionistic, jumbled tour through the first 30 days following the massacre in Southern Israel of October 7, 2023. It will, at times, likely strike you as naïve, or biased, or simplistic, digressive, unfocused, or embarrassing in its sincerity.
The third — and this is the most crucial point — is that you should absolutely, positively, without a doubt make every effort to go to see Picking Up Stones. Challenge yourself and your friends to watch and listen with an open mind. It is one of the most searing, affecting, and important things you will see this year at Fringe, or beyond.
A central theme running through Laub’s show, including on the T-shirt she wears, is Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill. And, yes, in many ways, it is a fitting metaphor: two groups of people wake day after day to an endless cycle of the most horrific violence imaginable, and appear to be cursed to do so for eternity. But perhaps a more fitting image might be Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot, because, while others labour exhaustively and rancorously to try to unpick allocations of responsibility, Laub’s great contribution is to slice through the temptation to assign blame and instead focus on the concept of rehumanization. It’s a brilliant idea.
The show, obviously, cannot be separated from current and fast-changing events, including those that intrude even within the cosseted universe of the Fringe itself, what with a couple of Edinburgh venues having canceled performers simply for being Jewish. Regardless of whether you see yourself as “political,” the issue is omnipresent and inescapable.
The overwhelming compulsion is to invoke the luxury of looking away from the horror, and Laub’s act of valour, easily dwarfing all issues with the script or performance, is her quiet insistence on engaging, head-on and unflinchingly, with the atrocities. Though the physical stones in front of her are unnecessary as stage props, the accumulation of small stories and insights within her words eventually become like the pebbles placed on Jewish headstones to honour the dead and show that, powerfully, someone has borne witness.
