Rochester Fringe Festival 2025
Eleanor’s Story: Life After War
Ingrid Garner
Genre: Biography
Venue: Rochester Fringe Festival
Festival: Rochester Fringe Festival
Low Down
To develop a successful Fringe Festival show, one must consider creating a piece that travels well, has minimum staging, and can engage an audience without a large cast. With Eleanor’s Story: Life After War, show developer and actress Ingrid Garner does just that. With two wooden chairs and a vintage trunk, Garner brings her audience into post-WWII Germany, an American classroom, a family’s intimate living room, and myriad other locations, offered through expertly rendered vignettes, transporting us to a time that feels distant and yet eerily familiar, as the world reels from the fallout of Hitler’s reign.
Review
In this one-woman show, Garner shares the sequel to her acclaimed An American Girl in Hitler’s Germany. In this chapter, we see the young protagonist finally return to the United States after the conclusion of the war, only to realize the residual wounds are deeper and more pervasive than she could have imagined, touching friendships, dating, and familial bonds. Both pieces are directly drawn from the written memories of her grandmother who is still alive today, able to bear witness to her progeny’s ability to illuminate her stories with deftness and poise. Among other smart staging choices, Garner employs a swath of dark blue light to denote a memory of wartime, anchoring the audience as we vacillate between past and present. We see how mundane, seemingly innocuous moments of childhood can become jagged and punishing against the backdrop of the trauma our narrator has endured. The piece as a whole is timely, affecting, and perfectly paced, leaving the audience with a completely realized story.
What is most evident during this performance is that Ingrid Garner is a consummate actress and student of theater. Her ability to move between dialects, accents, generations – even continents – with seamless comfort is impeccable. She has a studied command of her body, anchoring the narrative in physical integrity and presence. Her show is tested, refined, and steeped in the veracity of a true expert of her craft. The apparent simplicity of the performance has no bearing on the skill with which it is conceptualized and delivered. Garner’s ability to breathe life into her grandmother’s words is not only essential theater, but a sobering reminder of history’s proclivity for repetition, and our responsibility to push against it.
