Philly Fringe 2026: The Lemonade Stand presents Lindsey Walko’s Bog Man

It’s about a woman named Lori who travels to Ireland and encounters a Bog Man—a man who fell into a bog millennia ago and was naturally mummified as a result, his corpse now on display at a local museum. The Bog Man follows her back home, where the unlikely couple forms a bond (cliché!) and realizes Lori’s professional dreams (boring!). Don’t blame the actor—she’s only doing it or else she’d lose her health insurance.

What follows is the actor’s internal monologue—interspersed with snippets from the play within the play, delivered upstage—in which she begins to suspect that she, the actor, is being haunted by the Bog Man. After all, wouldn’t you also haunt the person dragging your corpse across a stage, night after night, the person who is profiting from your pain? It’s an intriguing thematic inquiry, but the play struggles to plumb the depths of its nuances, to ground it in an emotional truth.

Enter the Bog Man

Thankfully, one of the show’s greatest strengths is exactly what you’d hope from a piece called Bog Man, which is that it has a Bog Man in it. The puppet, designed by Mae Merkle, is simple and haunting, a black husk of shriveled torso with sockets for eyes, a mouth agape in a silent scream. He sits there, quietly watching, for the full duration of the show, and by the end he seems a genuine presence.

Alas, the rest of the play does not meet the Bog Man on his level. The actor spends the first half of the play espousing a pessimistic view of art—where the play she’s in constitutes a malignant act against the Bog Man’s memory, making a joke of his suffering—that ultimately feels flimsy. Her arguments are delivered in a well-reasoned, almost academic tenor; it’s harder to locate them in an emotional context. Part of the problem is that we don’t really get to know this actor on a deeper level, beyond brief hints at a failed romantic past and a strained relationship with her father. The script too often offers snark as a substitute for character, and it becomes difficult to emotionally track what precipitates this actor’s haunting. Throughout, Waterman delivers a sure-footed performance, if occasionally too tightly wound.

A fuzzy finish

The play’s last third is its messiest, in which the actor abandons her play, leaving with it the visual language that has been built up over the last hour. In its place is what feels like a sketch of an ending, drawn in such broad strokes as to seem almost unreal. The Bog Man also gets a few monologues, but their relationship to the actor is unclear. At times they seem to diverge entirely from the actor’s point of view, but the actor’s increasing psychosis, coupled with the choice to have Waterman record the Bog Man’s inner voice, suggests that the Bog Man’s thoughts lie next to her own. It’s not necessary to fully elucidate a haunting of this nature, but the details remain too fuzzy to be read in an emotionally legible way.

This is a Fringe premiere, of course, so the show may yet find a more coherent realization. For now, it seems to drift, like its titular character, back down into the bog from whence it came.

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