How Not To Make It In America at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

There is a simmering, pre-smartphone nostalgia that clings to Emily Steel’s sharp-witted How Not to Make It in America, a play that captures the messy panic of trying to make it as an artist at the turn of the millennium.

Set in New York around 2001, the piece follows a fiercely ambitious, slightly pretentious Australian actor navigating the precarious edge of the American Dream. Visaless, broke, and couch-surfing after a relationship breakdown, he pays the rent with a soul-crushing gig at Kim’s Video (not the main one, mind) while holding out for “profound” work – the kind only found in off-off-Broadway profit-shares. Steel’s non-linear narrative cleverly bookends the shadow of 9/11, treating the tragedy not as explicit spectacle, but as a looming, disquieting backdrop to an era’s collective anxiety.

There are palpable echoes of Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick… Boom! in its portrayal of creative desperation. Stepping into the role mid-run, Jono Darby delivers an extraordinarily amiable performance. He grounds the protagonist’s millennial angst with a gentle, naive charm that keeps the audience firmly on his side, even as his personal life completely unravels.

It is a remarkably watchable, brilliantly observed hour of theatre. Steel strikes a delicate balance between romanticising the raw thrill of early-2000s Manhattan, seeing a screenwriter you’ve long admired, and exposing the brutal isolation of chasing a dream without a safety net. For anyone who has ever been forced to juggle creative dreams and financial realities, this superbly written piece hits close to home.