John Billingsley Will Bring 44 MINUTES to Edinburgh Fringe

The World Premiere of 44 Minutes, written by Lev Steinberg and directed by Michael DeFillipis will come to Edinburgh Fringe. Performances will run 6– 30 August at 21.05 at Front Room at Assembly Rooms.

Four men. Strangers. Trapped in a cage. Desperate, they try to piece together what their captors might want from them. Soon enough, they discover that they've been thrown into a perverse psychological experiment: they must choose one of them to die so the others might live. Whose life is more valuable and who should be sacrificed? And why these four men? Is there something that links them? Something even they are unaware of? And why does one of the men not even remember who he is? Is he the key to understanding the meaning of this horror? 

Part Sartre, part Hitchock, 44 Minutes is an existential thriller about the value of human life, the cost of vengeance and what it is to be a man at a time when that has never been more under question. 

Veteran actors John Billingsley (True Blood, Star Trek) and Dorian Missick (Better Call Saul, Luke Cage) join Christopher Ryan (American Horror Story) and Matthew Petrick (The Florida Project) in this debut play written by Iowa Playwriting Program alum Lev Steinberg and directed by Michael DeFilippis, fresh off of his tour de force rendering of Chekhov's Ivanov in New York. 

Lev Steinberg is a 17-year-old playwright, filmmaker, and actor. After being accepted into the prestigious Iowa Young Writers' Studio playwriting program, Lev wrote two original plays, 44 Minutes and Lockdown, the latter inspired by a real lockdown experience at his high school. Both plays received staged readings at New Circle Theatre Company. He is currently adapting Lockdown into a film. He is also the recipient of the May Sarton Writing Award for his short story writing. He recently wrote and directed three short narrative films and just completed a documentary through the Jacob Burns Film Center's Director's Cut Documentary Filmmaking Fellowship in New York. He is also currently interning for acclaimed writer/directors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen on a new docu-play for The Public Theater. As an actor, Lev has appeared in the Off-Broadway production of Bonus Life and staged readings of Finding Helen and Jeremy Kareken's Benjamin 2.0. Television credits include Law & Order: SVU. 

Michael DeFilippis is the Co-founder and Artistic Director of New American Ensemble, where he's directed John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and the recent critically acclaimed and sold out revival of Chekhov's Ivanov. He received his degree in acting from The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art; while there, he spent two years in apprenticeship to British director and pedagogue James Kemp, training in the lineage of the Yat Malmgren Character Analysis work, developed out of Laban movement theory. DeFilippis has studied directing under John Gould-Rubin - founding member of Labyrinth Theater Company, and is an alumnus of the directing track at The National Theatre Institute and the LaMama Umbria International Director's Symposium. In 2025 Michael became the first American director to ever be invited by Lev Dodin to observe the rehearsal process of the legendary Maly Drama Theater of St. Petersburg, Russia, with whom he now maintains a professional relationship. He has served on the directing faculty of The National Theatre Institute and privately teaches both acting and directing in Manhattan. 

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