Unfiltered #7 – The reality of getting Fringe ready with ‘Alison Larkin: Grief… A Comedy’

The key to dealing with a fear of abandonment? Date people you don’t like, so if they do leave you, it doesn’t matter. Which is exactly what I did for five decades. And then, in my 50’s, I fell fully in love for the first time.

His name was Bhima. He was a fifty-two-year-old climate scientist from South India who, like me, had immigrated to the US thirty years before.

I came to find my birth mother in Tennessee and stayed to do stand-up comedy in New York. He came to do a PhD in Chemical Engineering and stayed to set up a solar company in Vermont.

Way led on to way, we both married and divorced Americans who we’d found perplexing and rather tiring. Now here we were, fully in love for the first time in our lives. It was like wearing a shoe that’s too tight your entire life and then finally taking it off.

“We can’t be in love,” I said to Bhima one day. “Why not?” “There’s no friction. We don’t have to negotiate.” “I know. Isn’t it great?”

Then, in August 2020, five days after we decided to marry, Bhima died. Then something even more surprising happened. Instead of wanting to hide under the bed and never come out again, I found, to my astonishment, that I wanted to live – and love – more fully than ever before.

Whaaaaaat?

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who had seen my first show, found out what had happened, he insisted I return to comedy and write Grief… A Comedy, because, he said, ‘it will bring hope to a world that badly needs it.’ So, no pressure then?

The last time I performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, I was six months pregnant with my now twenty-three-year-old son. The Assembly Rooms flew me over from Los Angeles to perform my autobiographical comedy show about an adopted English woman who finds her birth mother in Tennessee. After each show, I’d whizz over to Chez Jules on Hanover Street because I was craving mussels and frites, which are now my son’s favorite food.

But I digress. Which, by the way, is genetic.

Flip forward to today, my two kids have just left college and this time the Soho Theatre is flying me to Edinburgh to perform Grief… A Comedy at the Assembly Rooms. And here I am again, staring at my suitcase, trying to figure out just how much rain gear I’ll need.

I’m excited about coming back to Edinburgh, which is a city I love, and I’m excited about returning to comedy. I’m curious to find out what it will feel like to be amongst so many humans after four years pretty much on my own, surrounded by trees and mountains in voluntary rural exile in Western Massachusetts.

I’m also wondering if the Edinburgh run and subsequent UK tour will make me want to move back to England, where I haven’t lived since I was twenty-five.

Either way, over the next few months, in addition to getting to perform for audiences, which I love, I’ll get to spend time with old friends and my family who I have missed so much.

This time preparing for Edinburgh has also involved writing a book, also called Grief… A Comedy, which tells the story of what happened when Bhima showed up at my kitchen table, six weeks after he died, determined to help me find love again.

For now, they’re only printing a limited number of advance copies and the only way people can get a book is immediately after a live show, and I’ve still got to number them. All the previews of Grief… A Comedy have sold out and people keep telling me they feel so much better when they come out from when they went in. So hopefully Tutu is pleased.

This year, for me, preparing for Edinburgh means a whole lot more than just learning my lines and packing. It means getting ready to share this story with you. Everyone goes on and on about how divided the world is. And it is. But there are many things that connect us too. For example, we all love, cry, laugh, lose people we love, grieve and begin again. I’m not alone. And neither are you.

I’m getting ready. I’ll see you soon.

About the show