Nadia P. Manzoor to Bring JERK OFF! To The Edinburgh Fringe
The solo play, directed by Suba Das, blends hip hop, comedy, and storytelling at the Fringe.
Jerk Off! is a blisteringly funny, disarming and ultimately devastating solo play written and performed by Nadia P. Manzoor (Burq Off!; Shugs & Fats, Gotham Independent Film Award-winning). After her mother's death, Nadia moves to Boston - where a 6'5" Puerto Rican hip hop dancer from the Bronx teaches her how to move, how to take up space, and how to battle. She doesn't realise she's being trained to fight him.
A darkly funny autobiographical play blending storytelling, comedy, movement and ritual, Jerk Off! follows a Pakistani-British woman who falls into an abusive relationship through the invigorating underground world of dance. As the relationship deepens, so does the violence - and so does Nadia's complicity in a cycle she's been trained to recognise at work but can't see in her own life.
Jerk Off! does not offer clean moral lines or easy catharsis. It refuses to offer simplicity in the presentation of a victim and instead insists on Nadia's agency, humour, surveillance, manipulation and eventual, hard-won liberation. Hip hop becomes both seduction and survival as the play asks how a woman raised to see marriage as her ultimate destination learns to stay with difficult men.
Nadia P. Manzoor comments, My mother died when I was twenty. I fell in love with a man who hurt me at twenty-two. It took me two decades to understand those weren't two separate stories. Jerk Off! is what happens when you finally let them be the same story.
Directed by award-winning theatre director, producer and dramaturg Suba Das (Top Girls, Liverpool Everyman; Abigail's Party; The Cat In The Hat, Leicester Curve), Nadia crafts a narrative that is as uncomfortable as it is exhilarating in a profoundly personal and ferociously funny show. Jerk Off! confronts the messy, complicated truth of how power operates from the inside - not just between men and women, but between mothers and daughters, between culture and desire.
Jerk Off! received an industry reading in February 2026, produced by Noor Theatre and Ma-Yi Theater Company, where it received a standing ovation from an invited audience. The show marks the highly anticipated follow-up to Nadia's internationally celebrated solo show Burq Off!, which toured globally to sold-out audiences across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Toronto, Vancouver, and Seoul. In that production, Nadia embodied 21 characters, earning widespread critical acclaim.
With Jerk Off!, Manzoor returns with a work that is sharper, riskier and even more revealing. Performances will run August 5-30.
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