EDINBURGH 2022: Justin Elizabeth Sayre Guest Blog

Guest Blog: Justin Elizabeth Sayre brings high-energy new 'whodunnit' play to the Fringe

Justin discusses how everyone wants to kill their family sometimes, but how do you make that funny?

Writer Justin Elizabeth Sayre blogs for Broadway World about bringing Lottie Plachett Took A Hatchet to the Fringe, writing a play based on a true crime and the process of turning research and facts into a new and comedic storyline

In 1893, Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her father and stepmother 40 whacks, or so the children's rhyme would tell us. She may or may have not. But why has this case fascinated us all for so long? There have been countless retellings of this horrific crime since it first made international news. What's always drawn me to the case, is the unknown. Why did she do it? How did she do it? Were there other people involved? Was it a plot that Lizzie took the fall for, or did she act alone? And most recently, how do you make it funny?

For the past few years, I've found myself writing a series of high-camp comedies. I started with my plays, Ravenswood Manor, a series of serialised plays that I called a Camp-Horror-Soap-Opera. John Waters has always been a hero of mine, so I wanted to make work that followed in his own ground-breaking path. In a world where everything is trying to be overly correct, what power can be had in reclaiming the rude. Camp for me is about exaggerating to such a height, that the lines begin to fracture and blur. In being so extreme, we live in a sense of height that allows for huge laughs, but also strange moments of heart. I'm trying to make comedies that touch you in a way.

So how to begin with Lizzie?

First, get the facts. I read books, watched documentaries, and watched the glorious 1970s TV movie with Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched fame. In diving deeper into the case, I began to see things that were at least making me laugh. Looking at the Borden case, one can't stop but see the misogyny. The theory of the "wandering womb," as was used in the Borden case, was a condition where 19th-century doctors believed that the "unused" uterus in the body of a "virgin of a certain age" would travel through her body driving its possessor to vaginal madness. It's so ridiculous and ripe for parody, but also touches upon conversations we're still having about the rights of women, certainly in the backward United States. There was also a strong anti-immigrant sentiment in the case, the Irish being scapegoats of the rabid xenophobes of the time, which again felt very prescient to our own time, and again so preposterous that making it funny seemed easy.

But in the centre of the play, is Lizzie, or in our case, Lottie. A strange young woman trying to find her own way in a world that doesn't present her with a great deal of options. Lottie, in our play, is a young woman obsessed with her father, perhaps a little too much, and while this remains her drive throughout the play, on a deeper level, she's a powerless person looking to take control of her own destiny. She's struggling against all the prejudice of the time and trying to find a way out. Maybe that way is cleaved with an axe, or maybe it's about a young woman finally freeing herself from the world that's held her back. That's at the heart of our show, past all the hilarity, the ridiculous, and the rude, our story is a play about a woman trying to find her own way, and that seems to be a theme to which each of us can relate.

Lottie Plachett Took A Hatchet, Assembly Roxy (Upstairs), 8.35pm, 4-27 August (not 17)

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