Philly Fringe 2025: Lightning Rod Special presents Alice Yorke and Scott R. Sheppard’s Lions

We can also guess why we’re in the audience, as they continue, “A lot of you out there have your own dead dads. Or you will.” This is, of course, very funny.

Kafka meets Dickens

In stark yet gentle terms, Yorke explains how Sheppard’s dad expired, and he explains how hers did. It’s a matter-of-fact montage of brain bleeds and bike accidents, cancer and pneumonia. Yorke recounts the impossibility of doing something like grocery shopping at a time like that, yet finding herself in the aisle two days later, longing for someone, anyone, even a stranger on the bus, to acknowledge that she is in pain.

“We lived an entire life in this period of time,” they say of their dads’ surreal final weeks in the hospital, where dilemmas like moving the car when you can’t find Dad’s keys somehow loom as large as crushing medical decisions. The practical problems of death and dying, like trying to crack a loved one’s computer password to access critical documents, give no quarter to grief.

The show’s description touts “a dose of Kafka and A Christmas Carol,” and it’s immediately clear why the aftermath of a death resembles the former (with endless phone calls, lists, notes, and certificates), but a splash of the early Victorian era alongside the wintry nostalgia of Christmas, with its candles and tinsel, feels apt too. With a billowing white feather quill, Yorke records the administrative minutiae of dying, evoking the equal measures of dignity, pomp, and absurdity that descend in death’s aftermath.

Rising to the quick-change challenge

This year’s overstuffed Fringe lineup (especially the ones on the packed Cannonball roster at the Drake’s two venues) requires that performances bundle in and out with as little as 30 minutes between the end of one show and the start of another on the same stage (shout-out to the many staffers who keep the audiences moving on schedule). Lions designers Colleen Murray (set and props), Masha Tsimring (lights), and John Gasper (sound) rise brilliantly to this challenge.

The show begins with a long, banquet-style table in a white skirt set diagonally on an empty black stage, and Yorke and Sheppard tote everything else in with them. As the performance unfolds, plastic bins disgorge a thrift shop’s worth of appliances, books, jackets, records, retro phones, shoes, candles, and more, perfectly evoking the sudden detritus of a dearly departed dad. Stormy crashes and an intruding blizzard, to deafening orchestral swirls, layer Gothic drama over quotidian realities—a perfect evocation of how the turbulent emotions of grief overlie the dry-eyed bureaucracy of death. Rebecca Kanach’s costumes add campy, Dickensian savor with top hats, luxuriant puffy shirts, Yorke’s plaid wasp-waisted tailcoat, high shirt-collars, and other details, cleverly layered with more contemporary looks to suit the script’s many moods.

Director Sarah Blush, also credited as the show’s developer, imbues the cheery, denying donk of the wrong laptop password with as much drama as a clap of thunder, and the longtime rapport between Sheppard and Yorke as performers adds humor and richness to even the smallest moments throughout the tight 70-minute runtime.

Important disappointments

In exposing their dads—in all their stubbornness, peccadilloes, and imperfect love—Yorke and Sheppard don’t spare themselves, quietly detailing their own stumbles and embarrassments. Sheppard says that Lions would have “crushed” his father, but he reflects movingly on “the gift of watching others fail.”

“My disappointments are important to me,” he goes on, “but I’m trying to set them down.” Yorke’s father left lists of his greatest regrets as well as his life’s high points, many of which are not important events but fleeting moments of joy, like catching the notes of a live saxophone while walking in the woods one day.

I hope this show about dead dads has a long life beyond this year’s festival. Get your tickets before this run closes on Sunday, September 21.