Interview: What Is One Woman Show? Creator and Star Liz Kingsman Fills Us In

“You’d think I would have an elevator pitch for my show by this point,” Liz Kingsman says with a laugh, “but I don’t.” She subsequently calls it a spoof, a parody, “like Robin Hood: Men in Tights but for solo theater,” and decidedly not an intentional riff on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s star-making Fleabag.

So what is One Woman Show? Well, it’s an international hit, coming to the Greenwich House Theater off-Broadway following sold-out runs in London, Sydney, Melbourne, and Edinburgh. It was nominated for an Olivier Award and named the comedy of the year by The Guardian. Among its backers are J.J. Abrams and Lorne Michaels. I’m still not quite sure what it’s about, so here’s Kingsman to give me a few more clues.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

For the people reading this, what can they expect from One Woman Show?
You’d think I would have an elevator pitch for my show by this point, but I don’t. [Laughs]. It’s a spoof. If you’ve ever seen a parody film, like Robin Hood: Men in Tights, it’s that, but for solo theater. All the profound and moving pieces of solo theater? It’s a joke version of that, essentially.

Now I’m just going to start singing “We’re men! We’re men in tights!”
Exactly. Just imagine an hour and 10 minutes of that song. From a positioning point of view, I’ve been everyone’s worst nightmare, because I don’t call it a play, but I also don’t call myself a comedian. So everyone’s like “What is it?” and I’m like “Well, I don’t know. Do we need to have a label on it?” And they’re like “Yeah, it would be really useful if we label it for these reasons.”

When did you start writing?
The idea came about a really long time ago, but we must remember there’s been a pandemic, so you gotta cut me some slack. It was a pre-pandemic outing the first time I did it. Truly, I was not meant to be writing the show. I got into this industry through sketch comedy, and I started doing more acting work, and I had a big conversation with my agent about how to reposition myself out of comedy. Then, about a week later, I was like “Oh, by the way, I’ve written a comedy show, I’m so sorry. I’m just gonna do it a couple of times to get it out of my system.” And it will continue to take over my life for one more summer in New York City. But yeah, it was just this idea that I couldn’t get out of my head, and I had the feeling that someone was gonna write it before I had the chance. I just had to get it down, was my sort of reasoning behind it.

Did you know it worked from the get-go, or did you need to get it in front of an audience before you realized that there was something to it?
It did take a lot of honing. I’m still rewriting. I am always changing bits and pieces. One of the two things have remained from the very first time I performed it till now was the ending. I won’t ruin what it is, but both conceptually and physically, I knew that I wanted the show to go here. The other thing that has not changed at all was the structure, the bones of it, that I wrote in a mad panic with two weeks to go before the first preview. Everything else in it, all the content, all the branches and leaves, have changed a hundred million times. What I’ve also found is just a process that repeats itself across anything that I’ve written. Your initial idea is always so complicated. About five minutes before you do the thing, you’re like “Oh, it’s none of that.” It’s simpler. You throw everything in the bin and then you’re like “Oh, it’s this one tiny thing.” That’s been interesting.

I was also worried for various reasons that it would come across as catty, or like I had a problem with the thing that I was parodying, because it does come from an affectionate place. So the very first time I did it was a big test as to whether the audience forgave me.

Are you excited to do it in New York? Are you looking forward to the off-Broadway of it all?
Mm-hmm. The show is about this character who is dreaming of bigger things, and there have been iterations of the show that didn’t make as much sense, because it’s been at the Sydney Opera House. I’m performing at the Sydney Opera House and I’m like “Does this make sense anymore?” But that makes it kind of funnier, right? If the character is dreaming of big things and they’re already doing something that big? I’m really enjoying the idea that the show gets to go in an off-Broadway theater. It feels very realistic to what the actual one-woman show would be.

I think I’m basically excited about performing the version of the character who is frustrated with where she’s at. I don’t want to do the Greenwich House Theater a disservice because I think they’re brilliant, but the building is currently covered in scaffolding. It’s covered up, which is hilarious. That sounds like I’m not very happy performing in New York —

But you’re excited to do the show the way it was meant to be.
Yeah. In the pandemic, we had to park the show for a year and a half. The studio space at the Soho Theater in London was my dream venue for it, because that’s where I’d done sketch shows and had an amazing time. It’s a beautiful room. [Director] Adam [Brace] had said to me that he didn’t know if the theater was going to reopen the small space because it was too much of a risk with Covid, whereas they could do socially distant performances in the big room, so how would I feel about maybe opening it there? And I was like “No, no, no, it wouldn’t make any sense. It has to be the small room. That’s where she would be.” So I’m excited to do this version again, where I get to be smaller.

Is New York the end of the line?
This feels to me like it’s goodbye, for sure. It’s been a running joke between me and the producers and with Adam about taking it to New York. There’s a line where I could say that I could take the show to New York if I wanted to, as if this woman has been really trying to get her show to New York and it hasn’t been happening. But she’s really defensive about it, saying, like, “I could do it. It’s not that I haven’t been asked.” So it’s quite poetic. It feels like there’s a symbolism to it that I’m enjoying, which is quite fun.