A State College native is realizing a dream by taking her original play to the world’s largest arts and entertainment festival.
Kait Warner’s “Take It Away, Cheryl” — which she describes as a “flirtatious, attention-deficit, tragicomic trip through a central Pennsylvanian kissing booth” — is making its way to the annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland next month.
Developed and produced in 2019 as Warner’s senior thesis performance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, “Take It Away, Cheryl” was created by the writer and actor under the mentorship of Obie Award winner Heather Christian and the direction of Danica Jensen.
Warner originally planned to take the play to the Fringe in 2020, but COVID-19 caused the festival’s cancelation. She and her production team instead took the show online for Zoom workshops and to continue her goal of engaging communities from the stage, hosting online events to raise funds for production costs, such as cabarets that featured an array of performers, including some from State College.
But taking the show to Edinburgh has remained a dream, one born from her time as a State College Area High School student.
“Ever since I went to the Fringe Festival with the [State High] Thespians as a high school student, I knew it was a dream of mine to go back,” Warner told StateCollege.com in 2020. “With this piece, there were two options — let it exist as my senior thesis performance and let it kind of live and die there, or continue to develop it and work on it and bring it to more communities. I felt like I wasn’t done telling this story and I wouldn’t be done telling this story until I followed through with my personal artistic mission of engaging rural, metropolitan and international communities.”
In “Take It Away, Cheryl,” people have stopped visiting the county fair kissing booth for kisses but instead to tell the title character about their problems.
“The story explores the lengths one woman will go to make you feel better, and when Cheryl makes an error with catastrophic consequences, she must go to hell and back to save those she loves once and for all,” according to a news release.
The show draws from Warner’s experience seeing young men struggle with mental illness and the women who carried the weight as emotional caretakers.
“I wrote it [Take it Away, Cheryl] from a pain so deep, a question, something I hadn’t named,” Warner said. “All I knew is that young men in my small, central Pennsylvanian town kept dying, often from untreated mental illness, and that I saw the women in my town bending themselves in half trying to hold everyone and everything together.”
The show was created “to explore the type of story that audiences seem to be hungry for; something that feeds us a digestible slice of the chaotic present and gets us to laugh at the sad, absurd state of the union. And to maybe find a little hope inside that laughter,” according to the release.
“At its core, this show is about love, and the uneven division of emotional caretaking labor between men and women, which has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. This show sheds a light on the women who are not being seen in the work thrust upon them.”
“Take It Away, Cheryl” will be at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Aug. 5-13, with performances at 5:20 p.m. each day at Greenside at Infirmary Street.
For updates, visit the show’s Instagram and Twitter accounts.
