Ed Fringe Sweethearts Take on the American Military and LBJ: In Conversation with Xhloe and Natasha

Where do the ideas for consecutive Fringe First Award-winning plays come from? When I spoke to playwright-performers Xhloe and Natasha, they told me that the stroke of inspiration for A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First was blessed onto them as a joke. During the 2023 Fringe run of their previous show, What If They Ate The Baby?, they were tossing around various ideas for what could come next: “We always tend to start brainstorming by thinking of archetypes or settings, and the idea of Boy Scouts came up as a joke. We watched films like Stand By Me and found the trope of American boyhood to be something interesting, because we hadn’t lived it. We both might’ve gone through something adjacent to it, but not the real thing”. 

“I grew up with three brothers,” Natasha Roland added, “and my mother has always told me how we ‘were all brothers’. So the idea of boyhood was there, but I couldn’t claim it.”

Xhloe and Natasha in A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First. Photo Credit: Morgan McDowell

Set in the 1960s, A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson sees children Ace (Xhloe Rice) and Grasshopper (Natasha Roland) fantasising about meeting their beloved titular president and impressing him with their military prowess, all the while imagining what it must be like to really be caught in battle. 

As the play deals with the idea of a romanticised past and how easily people can be manipulated by weaponised nostalgia, having the two characters be Boy Scouts sits at the essence of its foundation. The concept of a mythic American boyhood sells an insidious idea of a former ‘great America’ that doesn’t exist, Roland told me. “It’s become synonymous with the ‘good old days’, even if there weren’t really any.” This same concept is one that both playwrights admit has sprung from a prominent American nationalism which, according to her, “meant we were raised to believe we were the ‘good guys’.” 

“In adulthood, you have to reckon with the fact that that may not be the case, and it makes you think ‘oh, wow, I don’t know if I can deal with this’,” she continued. 

This childhood naivety about politics is one that the play draws most of its conflict from – the audience knows that the military, which Ace and Grasshopper have been sold on, is built on deception, even if the characters do not know it. “The characters themselves don’t really lose their faith,” Rice explained. “It makes sense when you consider humanity’s natural affinity for optimism. We survive by remembering things as better than they actually were: it’s a coping mechanism, really.”

Similarly, the use of music by the Beatles throughout the play supports the thematic drive of criticising falsely constructed notions of ‘the good old days’. I find myself intrigued by the choice to use the Beatles’ music, instead of an American musician who might’ve also represented a ‘golden age’ of American identity (such as Elvis Presley). 

“The Beatles strike a chord of nostalgia for everyone,” Roland believed. “No matter whether you’re a die-hard fan or not. From a theatrical standpoint, their music puts the audience in a particular headscape of nostalgia, and they feel as though they’re in on the secret, because they know the songs. It’s a great vessel for it. We never want to spoon-feed an audience, and so we make them figure it out in a way, and music really helps with that.”

“Nostalgia can be weaponised easily. It’s a very powerful goggle – people are biased towards their childhood, especially when you consider that growing up now is very complex, digital, and interconnected, as opposed to the more laid-back feel of the 60s, with things like Woodstock, the TV revolution, and hippies. But the Beatles’ music, because it’s so familiar to everyone, catches the audience out and gets you both rocking along with the music and questioning it at the same time.”

The ideas that came up in our conversation – of national pride usurping rationality and the desire to preserve an idealised memory – sparked my interest in what exactly they want people to take away from their performance. In something as immediate as theatre, the audience’s reaction is much more palpable than it might be with any other form of writing, and the relationship between performer and audience member is felt equally on both sides. “It’s always interesting to see the moment when the audience becomes aware that we can see them,” Roland remarked. 

Xhloe and Natasha in A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First. Photo Credit: Morgan McDowell

“[A Letter to LBJ] calls the audience to question their own nostalgia and lets us look people in the eye while they do so. Everything we write necessitates theatre as a form, especially how we present the fluidity of age and identity; there are points in the play when the audience might not be sure whether we’re still Boy Scouts, or soldiers reminiscing on their past. The medium of theatre facilitates this ambiguity, and the audience is made to imagine certain things,” Roland shared with me. In other words, it is a storytelling piece laced with Xhloe and Natasha’s archetypal style based on the physicality of clowns. 

Religion, and how childhood innocence about the world bleeds into a particular naivety regarding religion, complicate the play’s tense relationship with America’s chequered history. “I was a very nervous and logical kid, because I was always conscious of the fact that there was an all-seeing thing watching over me,” Rice admitted, “so there was that fear of surveillance.”

In A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson, this fear is presented in the form of Ace and Grasshopper’s relationship to their current president, who was a symbol of national hope after the assassination of John F Kennedy and became a stand-in for the monolithic ideals of an all-American lifestyle. Despite Johnson’s flawed policies, the Boy Scouts of Xhloe and Natasha’s play still worship him. Perhaps it is more apt to suggest that they worship what he represents; he becomes a sort of celebrity to them. The concept of a “celebrity” is a huge part of American culture, Roland told me, carrying with it a sense of worshipping and fighting for someone whom you feel really knows you.

Xhloe and Natasha in A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First. Photo Credit: Morgan McDowell

This, paired with the idea of surveillance, also makes for interesting commentary on how male friendships are constantly scrutinised under the guise of masculinity. What does it mean to have an ‘appropriately masculine’ friendship? Rice pointed out how many explorations of men’s feelings for one another – whether these are platonic or romantic – are all built around a fear of crossing an invisible boundary that delineates “when it’s wrong or right to do something, or act a certain way”. Can a friendship that is founded in an environment that prioritises masculinity (i.e. the Boy Scouts, or the military) break away from the norm and become pure friendship, no strings attached? How do we reconcile the images of politicians with the real people behind the farce? How far can nostalgia really take us before it eventually starts pushing us back again?

At the Soho Theatre, Xhloe and Natasha’s A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson reckons with these thorny quandaries. It is brilliantly acted and performed, with a touch of mischief that opens up the possibility for yet another 80s film to inspire what will undoubtedly be their next award-winning play. 

A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First plays at the Soho Theatre until 29 March.