Philly Fringe 2025: ArtSake Theatre Company presents Malcolm MacKenzie’s Roadkill Bambi: A Vaporwave Play

Playwright Mal MacKenzie combines a car crash, Edelman’s provocative polemic, and a queer time loop in this tight 50-minute Fringe show, which had its world premiere at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. There are two overlapping narratives. In the first, Portia (Lauren McKee) and Alison (Mal MacKenzie) are driving home from a wedding, using the car ride to cover topics from changing herbivore diets to Portia’s graduate thesis to 2000s pop icon JoJo. At some point, a deer crosses the road. Alison may or may not swerve, but Portia always dies. And then she wakes up, reliving this final conversation over and over.

This existential tension drives the show, knowing that this imminent violent death is coming in the happiest or saddest of endings. And it explicitly haunts her as the conversations with Alison turn from playful banter to serious conversations about their relationship. Alison may not be stuck in the time loop, but she has been working through her own repetitive thoughts. In this two-hander narrative, McKee and MacKenzie deftly play a realistically flawed couple who nevertheless have a good relationship, as the time-loop frame reveals problems they didn’t know existed.

The wisdom of Punxsutawney Phil

The other storyline, which provides comedic relief from Portia’s time loop, involves the literal and metaphorical Deer the couple are about to hit. Played by a fantastic PJ Witkowski, the jaded Deer chain-smokes while lamenting about its in-laws, laws of thermodynamics, marine biology, and constant thoughts of death. The Deer provides the theoretical underpinnings of the show. Its role in giving scientific lectures of looming environmental destruction (largely human-caused) isn’t as nihilistic as it appears. As the Deer notes, decisions that we make to survive a changing world’s future inherently change us.

In a lesser writer’s hands, this contrast could be really unbalanced—comparing the challenges of honest communication in relationships with the potential heat death of the universe takes a few mental leaps to fully get on board. But the continual reference of Harold Ramis’s 1993 film Groundhog Day as both framework and metatext helps ground the play in multiple ways. Portia repeatedly references the film as a philosophical text to convince Alison of her dilemma; Witkowski is a Punxsutawney Phil repeatedly emerging to make predictions about the state of the world. Director Allegra Ritchie uses the intimate performing space to further drive home the claustrophobic reactions of being stuck in time and grief loops.

The opportunity of uncertainty

I had to look up the meaning of “vaporwave” in the show’s subtitle, which refers to the musical genre (here implemented in its sound design). Vaporwave emulates nostalgic feelings through cyclical, melancholy beats. It’s a fitting backdrop that notes how humans’ use of nostalgia fuels imagined futures. The play asks, but doesn’t answer, how we act now for a better tomorrow when our futures are constantly changing. Uncertainty can be an opportunity, but it’s also a real loss that has to be grieved and let go.

I found it most heartening when Portia notes that the universe in Groundhog Day wants Bill Murray to be good in order to break out. Even amidst all the political, climate, and personal crises that keep us constantly grieving a future that never was, I do hope that the universe wants us to be good to it.

Know before you go: this show contains strobe light effects, and references to car accidents, nonconsensual sex and intimacy, smoking, and drinking.

At top: Lauren McKee, Mal MacKenzie, and Em Presley in the world premiere of Roadkill Bambi at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe. (Photo courtesy of ArtSake Theatre Company.)