DO THIS ONE THING FOR ME Comes To Edinburgh This Month

Based on the writer and performer's own relationship with her father, a Sephardic Jew from Greece who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Jane Elias asks what it is to live with generational trauma. Do This One Thing for Me is a storytelling solo show with elements of tender humour, as Jane honours her father's legacy and past trauma once he has passed away. Told simply with just a chair, a black backdrop, original music, and lighting design by Renée Molina, Jane brings to life various characters, multi-rolling between herself at different ages, her father and a range of characters from her life.

Do This One Thing for Me uses Jane's conversational and charismatic storytelling to explore themes of grief and inherited trauma, of growing up with immigrant parents, and the pressures to fulfil her father's wishes to live the life he wants for her and to continue the family legacy. Realising she may not be able to grant his wish to one day dance together at her wedding, she instead honours him by taking part in the March of the Living in Poland.

"I wrote this show because after my dad passed away, the need to keep his story alive through my voice became more urgent. I also started to reflect more deeply on how his experiences have informed my own life, and asking questions about the responsibilities and challenges confronted by the next generations, which I am exploring in this play. Its themes have universal appeal, and more specifically there are a lot of points of commonality for anyone who is a child of immigrant parents and who is continuously navigating and negotiating old world versus new."

Jane Elias is an actor and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, with other works including Baby Steps (2015) and Girl Is Mine (2018) which were respectively a finalist for the City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting and Heideman Award and nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The producer for Do This One Thing for Me, Allison Parker has previously worked on various Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows including 17 Minutes (2023, Gilded Balloon), Yoga with Jillian (2023, Pleasance Courtyard), Intelligence (2022, Assembly Roxy), Trump Lear (2018-2019, Pleasance Courtyard) and The Sister (2016, Paradise Green).

Do This One Thing For Me is at Bedlam Theatre, 31 July - 26 Aug 2024 (not 12 & 19), 15.30 (16.45).

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