Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Pajama Talks
Ad Astra Productions
Genre: New Writing, Theatre
Venue: TheSpaceUK
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A coming-of-age story following childhood best friends Abby and Nina as they revisit memories of their sleepovers from an adult perspective. Together they are forced to confront their friendship, their girlhood and their personal identity. The show examines the joys and hardships of growing up and grief in all forms, asking the question: are the people we’ve loved and lost still with us? A play about platonic love, figuring out life and existential conversations in the middle of the night.
Review
An adult woman leafs through a memory book – the kind of scrapbook a child keeps, with assorted now-peeling stickers on the cover, worn around the edges by the time it’s pulled back out of a box – and begins to turn its pages.
Developed from a senior thesis project at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and written by Sofia Tarczy-Hornoch, the play fits its small, shallow stage perfectly: a mattress and covers on one side, a single chair on the other. Offstage, young voices introduce the story – two friends having their first sleepover – and a second woman soon joins the first, the pair watching their younger selves as their friendship unfolds across several years, each memory triggered by the book and played out before them, and us.
Director BreLynn Mellen keeps a clear but invisible line between the two sides of the stage, packing the youngsters’ bed area with activity and spirited discussion, while the adult side stays quieter, more reflective.
The writing is tender and nuanced as adult Nina gently encourages Abby to look at the difficult times as well as the joyous ones – the arguments, the fallings-out, always mended with a pinky promise. As the girls grow, the agenda for sleepovers grows with them: secrets, small betrayals, first kisses, the childish fear of the dark giving way to an uncertain exploration of death and what comes after, when Nina’s grandmother dies. Will it be heaven and hell, or just being remembered? They settle on grandma’s cups of tea.
Four actors play the two women: young Abby (Kira Mahealani Stone) and Nina (Sylvie Tamar), and their adult counterparts Abby (Sofia Tarczy-Hornoch) and Nina (Brooke Stevenson), the older pair seeing their own past through the lens of the scrapbook, and often disagreeing with each other about what actually happened. The casting is near perfect, each adult a convincing echo of her younger self, and the lighting design reinforces the sense of looking back through a different light – warm and soft for the memories themselves, a sharper blue reserved for Adult Nina. All four are excellent actors, but Stone and Tamar playing the younger pair do get most of the best lines, and their performances are exceptional, brimming with energy and passion.
The timing, pace and acting are stunning throughout. Beneath the gentle humour runs a heart-rending thread of coming to terms with loss, played out with real understatement, and a quiet focus on what we choose to hold on to once someone is gone.
