Review by Kate Gaul
Drawing on their own experiences of being in military families comes this inspired two-hander about the idealised American childhood, and the boys it left behind. From Edinburgh Fringe Festival darlings (consecutive 2022 and 2023 Fringe First Award winners) New Yorkers Xhloe and Natasha in association with the SpaceUK present “A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First.” In what is surely a masterclass for the ideal fringe drama this goes straight into my top ten for this year (including their beautifully absurd “What is They Ate the Baby?”- which also explores American archetypes). A bare stage save for a large truck tyre, a soundscape of birds and insects at night, a monumentally beautiful script and adorable characters instantly transport us to a world with the feel of Huckleberry Finn, but Lyndon B Johnson is president of the USA, and the Beatles are hot.
Johnson, a Silver Star-decorated Commander in the Second World War, had a presidential term that both began and ended bathed in blood. The 36th President was sworn in on Air Force One in the two hours following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. During Johnson's six-year term, he saw the number of troops deployed in Vietnam blow out to over half a million. I am assuming the title refers to civil rights leader Jackie Robinson’s letter to LBJ in 1967 of an impassioned plea to end the war in Vietnam. It is an eccentric title, but it gives a profound resonance to the work as we watch Ace (Natasha Roland) and Grasshopper (Xhloe Rice) play a pair of muddy kneed 7-year-old boy scouts in gloriously decorated costumes.
They recount boyish escapades, they speak in codes, they dare each other to be great, they play soldiers, they swing rope. Sneaking out of the house one night to the station of their small town, they eagerly await the passing of a train in which rides LBJ. In the shadow of the Vietnam war, people of the USA clung to LBJ as a figure of stability and sureness an do these two boys. Both have absent father figures and higher powers become stand-ins for authority – God is in there too, but she/he gets less of a footprint in this play except when God is mixed up with LBJ!
Ace and Grasshopper are learning to be men. To make a promise, a man must both spit and shake on it, there is nothing greater a man can be than a soldier, and never (ever) hold hands with another man (unless it’s an extreme circumstance). What is the moment that a boy becomes a man? If the American idea of masculinity -one that equates violence with strength - makes casualties out of men, then in war for what are young men dying?
The Beatles tunes accompanied deftly on harmonica by the performers: “Ob-La-Di. Ob-La-Da” expresses their vitality and fizz, “I want to Hold your Hand” perhaps expressing deeper (private) feelings. The harmonica is also an eerie instrument, and the performers use it to great effect later in the piece. I guess it’s because the era they portray just wasn’t as great in hindsight.
Performed in the round the effortless choreography, overall staging and physicality is elegant and assured. The playwrighting is rigorous and wastes not a moment or a word in conveying story, character and theme.
In a quotation from Broadway World: “co-writers and performers Xhloe and Natasha said, "When you're raised as a girl in America, and perhaps everywhere else too, boyhood is this mythic experience tied to nationalism and nostalgia, it made us feel like we were missing out on something. We longed to be treated like a boy, to be let into this club that had been portrayed in American Pop culture since the 30s, scraping your knees, playing ball, and being a good American Boy Scout. Part of growing up for us was realizing this desire is manufactured by the same systems that benefit from the myth that America has fallen from some former time of "greatness". We want to capture the rude awakening of realizing you might not be the good guy, the devastation of losing your religion, it's something we still grapple with."
“A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First” is a triumph. Go see it!!
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