Nuts over Fringe: The Great Pistachio goes to Edinburgh

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I would say the most important thing UMass's theater program teaches you is to build and nurture your creative communities. Make friends, collaborate, share your ideas and support others. Your time there isn't a competition to be the best, it's for everyone to lift each other up.

— Nicholas Cummings '19

A few weeks ago, we brought you the story of alum Jessi Dimmock '19, who worked behind the scenes as a technician at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, the massive and legendary Scottish performing arts festival that puts thousands of performances in front of audiences over three weeks every summer. Now, we’re bringing you a trio of alums who were on the other side of the curtain this summer at the festival! 
Writer-performer Nicholas Cummings ‘19, along with performers Ellen Keith ’18 and Tyler DiBenedetto ‘19, all friends since college, had wanted to bring a show to Fringe since attending the UMass Fringe travel course in 2018, and this summer, they brought Nick’s play, The Great Pistachio. We sent them questions about the process and compiled their responses below. (Responses have been edited for length.) 
Read on for their great adventure!

Question: Tell me about The Great Pistachio. 
Nick: I wrote it in about a month or so in January of 2024, which is one of the fastest first drafts I've ever written for anything. It came at a time where my relationship with my writing was at its most strained. I was taking novel writing courses in New York City hoping to strengthen my ability with longer form narratives, except what I wasn't anticipating was that in these classes my fellow classmates would be published authors and working screenwriters. It was a terminal case of imposter syndrome. I found myself losing my ability to work on those assignments and feeling like the amount of time I was dedicating to this work was making me miss out on actually living my life. So when it came time to work on them, I would open up Final Draft and vent my frustrations into a play instead. The play ended up being The Great Pistachio. I find it very funny that the only thing I have to show from my novel writing classes is a play.

Ellen: The Great Pistachio is an absurdist piece about making theater at the end of the world. Two estranged brothers try to mount a ridiculous play with a lone survivor of the apocalypse. I play Beatrice, a young woman who grew up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. She loves to play and do voices, her inner child comes to life when she finds these two old men and puts up a play with them.

Question: At what point did you become involved? 
Ellen: Nick wrote the piece for himself, me, and Tyler. So I have been involved since the beginning of the process. He had us read it over a Zoom call and asked if we should try to bring it to fringe. Tyler and I were immediately on board.

Tyler: I got to be lucky enough to be in the original cast of The Great Pistachio in both its national and international premiere as the character of Boris Brambles. I was involved both on and off the stage as both a performer and in helping produce the show alongside the rest of the cast and crew.

Question: When did you first start talking about taking this to Edinburgh Fringe?
Tyler: We had an early conversation about going to Fringe given how brilliant the writing was to the relevancy of making art in the face of the world ending. For us it was just making sure we have the right kind of venue and space given the needs of the show.

Nick: Since I did the UMass Fringe Program in the Summer of 2018 I knew I wanted to bring a show there. So when I had my cast of myself and my two close friends, and we had a fun time reading the script at early readings in November 2024, I decided this will be the year, and I'll figure everything out as I go. I did have to make revisions. The show's original run time was around 83 minutes and Fringe shows are usually 50-70 minutes … and I had to work on cutting about 13 minutes from the piece! But in those revisions I figured out how to be very intentional and precise with my writing, and ended up reworking a few scenes that I ended up liking better after having to work with the time constraints.

Question: How do you get a show into Fringe? Is there an application process? An audition? 
Nick: There is an application process and they're on a rolling basis with unique applications for each venue. You will need to prove the show exists (ie send the script, photos and videos if you have them). For smaller venues, they will read your script or see the media you provided them and decide if your show would be a good fit for them, some will also have follow up interviews to discuss more questions about your show, and which spaces they could potentially offer. At bigger venues the process is much more involved, to get accepted you need videos, professional reviews, and an already established run of the show at previous festivals or backed by a production company with a strong reputation. That may sound scary, but if you're doing your first Fringe don't even think about the big venues, that's for much later. The smaller venues are all about propping up and supporting emerging artists and are there to guide you throughout every step of the process.

Question: What was it like performing in Fringe? Were there ways that the audience reaction or engagement surprised you? 
Nick: It is relentless but endlessly supportive and exciting. The most important thing I can prepare you for is that YOU NEED TO FLYER FOR YOUR SHOW. At least a couple hours every day standing at corners and handing out flyers to entice potential audience members, that's where the majority of your audience will come from. It can seem scary or tiring having to pitch your show to a ton of strangers, but it's a skill you will need to learn. When we flyered, my co-stars, Tyler and Ellen, and I would do it in our show's character. We were all absurd characters who would bicker with one another on the street, which we felt gave a better representation of the energy of the show, and piqued a lot of passersby's interest.

Ellen: We learned a LOT in terms of what makes a successful run at Fringe. Later time slots, being at a venue with lots of foot traffic, and having at least a two or three week run gives you a higher chance of success. It was interesting performing for an international audience. The humor is different, so there were jokes that always landed in the US that never got laughs, and moments that never quite landed in the US that killed at Fringe.

Question: What’s a favorite moment from your run?
Nick: I put "you need to flyer" in all caps in the last question for a reason. There was one day during our run which was the only day we didn't have any pre-sold tickets. It was also a cold and rainy Tuesday, and our show was at noon and we were tired and running slowly that morning. We decided to not do much flyering that day. And because of that perfect storm we had an audience of one. That run of the show was by far the most fun and memorable, because we gave it all our energy and really made it our mission to make that one guy laugh. At the end we gave him a standing ovation. We chatted for a bit and afterwards he ended up giving us a glowing review on the Fringe website. I share this memory both because it was my favorite run of the show we did, but also to share that you should not base success and failure over audience sizes, that's not what you're here for. You're here to share your art and success comes from if you gave every audience your all regardless of size.

Tyler: One of our early performances we had only 1 ticket sold for our almost 40 person venue, and the people who ran the venue asked us if we wanted to cancel the show or perform for the singular audience member. We agreed as a team that we’d let the audience member decide if they felt comfortable enough being the only one in the crowd, then the show must go on. The audience member wanted to see so we went on and did The Great Pistachio for 1 audience member and it was electric! He was such a gracious audience member and it revitalized the cast on just how good of a show we had.

Audience member Riley Shefford's review (pictured below):

This show was extraordinarily good! I went on a whim because the flyer was funny and it was such a pleasant surprise. The show is very funny, a little surreal in context but the themes within are very easily relative. It was fabulously acted by the three performers, even though I was the only audience member there. I could not believe the passion and commitment they gave to a one audience show. One of the three also wrote the show!!! It was honestly brilliant!

This show deserves to be a success this fringe. It deserved full audiences. If you are in doubt, go, you will not regret it.

I hope they survived the apocalypse...

Question: Because we have to bring it back to UMass and UMass Theater, was there something you learned here that ended up being particularly useful in the process of creating and performing the show?
Tyler: I got the pleasure of working on and producing a show at UMass during my time there when I co-directed a production of Jesus Hopped the A Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis with Tatiana Rodriguez. I learned a lot about what it means to sell your show authentically to an audience that is ready to engage. There’s a sense of purpose or self-motivation that I think is so much easier to push for when you are working on a piece that has personal or sentimental value.

Nick: First of, (if you can afford it) do the UMass Edinburgh Program (ed: ENGL 397H Edinburgh Fringe Festival study abroad course)! To be able to see that much unique and boundary pushing art all in two weeks was extremely motivating and inspiring. But I would say the most important thing UMass's theater program teaches you is to build and nurture your creative communities. Make friends, collaborate, share your ideas and support others. Your time there isn't a competition to be the best, it's for everyone to lift each other up. Almost every single person who worked on The Great Pistachio was a UMass Theater alum, and all that weren't, I met through other UMass Theater alums.

Ellen: It’s never one person that gets that final product on the stage. And this was so necessary at Fringe. We had a team of five: three cast members, a director, and a board op. We all had to wear many hats. Getting the space set up/broken down in 15 minutes, finding props/set/costume pieces by scouring thrift stores in Edinburgh, lugging suitcases full of newspapers to and from the theater every day. We all needed to contribute more than our “roles” normally require to make sure the show ran smoothly.