EDINBURGH 2026: QFWFQ Q&A

BWW catches up with Gregory Nussen to chat about bringing QFWFQ to the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about QFWFQ

QFWFQ is a labyrinth-like, clownish play loosely based on Italo Calvino’s postmodern novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It's a show about implicit connections between the personal and the public, asking how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are influenced by the stories we tell about the world, and vice versa. And it’s also a show about a timeless being caught in a strange bureaucratic spider-web in which trans identity, suicidal ideation, Zionist propaganda, Judaism, architecture and jazz music all collide in a ridiculous, comic maelstrom. 

What was the inspiration behind it?

The novel had been living in my mind, rent-free, since I read it in 2014. I had always had this idea of adapting it, especially after doing my last solo show off-Broadway (also an adaptation of a dense literary work). But I wasn’t quite sure how to do it until 7 October happened, and suddenly my life was upended by a mix of family estrangement, coming out as non-binary, and a host of other mega changes. It seemed clear to me that there was an obvious connection between what was happening in my personal life, the world, and the book. And once I knew that, I felt like I had to make the show, almost in order to survive.

How does your own experience connect to the original material?

Calvino’s novel is a meditation on both why we tell stories at all and who is allowed to tell stories. It uses this extremely bizarre, multi-pronged narrative, told almost entirely in second person, to ruminate on the political structure of storytellling - while also asking enormous questions about the Westernized, slavish devotion to an A-B-C narrative. In the last few years, I’ve come to understand that my self-awareness and awareness about the world has been filtered through a gatekeep-y prism of ignorance, shame, fear and prejudice. I see a lot of connections between myself and the novel in the way I’ve been taught for so long not to question the stories I’ve been told, and how that teaching has prevented me from seeing myself and the world in a more holistic - and true - way.

What sets it apart from other shows at the festival?

A difficult question to answer since I haven’t seen most of what’s on! But I do think my show is talking about deeper questions around Judaism/Zionism and the genocide in Gaza in ways that I haven’t heard happening much elsewhere, and it is also drawing lines between queerness and the world of geopolitics that I also haven’t seen much happening elsewhere. Plus, it may be the only show in the festival with a deliberately unpronounceable name.

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of doing the show thus far has been the extremely wide range of responses to it. Queer and trans folk have seen themselves in my coming-out story; Jews have seen themselves in the way I talk about being propagandized as a child; Palestinians have told me they are thankful I’m making these connections; artists have related to the show’s naked assessment of the difficulty of… making things. I hope that everyone, regardless of their faith or political belief or gender or sexual identity at least comes away with the courage to ask questions that they have previously been too scared to ask.

QFWFQ runs at Edfringe from 6-31 August

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