Abby Wambaugh Knows How to Begin Again (and Again and Again)
Abby Wambaugh’s The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows, running at Dixon Place, debuted at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Photo: Emilio Madrid.
Choosing to end a show with a sing-along is generally inadvisable. The decision requires profound trust in oneself as a performer—and in the audience. But the choice is made and miraculously pulled off by newcomer Abby Wambaugh in her solo show The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows, first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in summer 2024 and now running through October 25 at Dixon Place.
The show’s title accurately predicts its content: Wambaugh delivers the first few minutes of 17 solo show ideas she has considered. The concept arose while attending the Fringe as an audience member. “I was watching like four or five shows a day and walking out of them like, ‘Whoa. You could do this and you can do that!’” she says during an interview with The Hat after starting the show’s run.
At first, these shows appear to be individual entities—each with their titles projected onto a screen behind her—but as the night progresses, connections are revealed and the result is moving. “I’ve thought through them and why they fit together,” Wambaugh explains, “but there is something about it that is more about a feeling of connectedness and what it’s like to try after a loss.”
The loss central to her story is a miscarriage she had five years ago that, as she tells it both in the show and in our conversation, was the inciting event of her comedy career. She had done theater and improv in high school, but mostly left that world behind in adulthood. In New York City, Wambaugh was working as a teacher, and had started a family with her partner. After having her second child, she and her partner made the decision to move to Denmark—where he is from—in order to be able to afford to raise their family. In Denmark, Wambaugh became pregnant with her third child and then had a late miscarriage, 17 weeks into the pregnancy. It was that tragedy that brought her to the revelation that she should give stand-up comedy a try.
Now, she firmly believes that she couldn’t have made the pivot without socialism: “I got [to Denmark] and all my basic needs were met. I couldn’t have dived into a creative pursuit in this way if I hadn't been somewhere where I didn't have to worry about health care for my kids and how I was gonna make rent.”
Wambaugh was worried about the response to talking about her miscarriage in a comedy show, but as she developed the piece, she says her partner was reassuring and supportive. He came to her with the simultaneously apt and crass metaphor that “you can only give birth to what’s inside of you.” Luckily, she found the humor in it. For Wambaugh, there was no way to write this show without including the day she woke up in the hospital, high on drugs after her miscarriage, filled with a newfound urge to write jokes. “It felt true,” she says of making her miscarriage story central to this solo show. “That was what I wanted to make. Like how am I gonna talk about this without talking about that?”
Wambaugh fully commits to each segment, then transitions to the next by ringing her desk bell. Photo: Emilio Madrid.
Directed by Lara Ricote and produced by Jenney Shamash, Ally Engelberg, and Mike & Carlee Productions, the show transitions are neatly demarcated with a blackout and the ding of a desk bell. The stagings range from the straightforward “Straight Stand-Up,” which contains some of the first jokes she ever wrote, to the more clown-like physical comedy of “Vacuum,” which sees her perching on a rolling stool and pedaling around the stage, fully committing herself to becoming a vacuum. By the end of this scene, she has fastened her mouth to the pant leg of a poor front-row spectator.
But this is just her warm-up to further audience participation. When a performer elects to bring up the houselights during a show, it’s a litmus test. The plainclothes thespians shift in their seats and preemptively clear their throats, while those who would rather die than be called on anchor themselves to their chairs and pray their middle-distance stare effectively communicates: Absolutely not.
Wambaugh, though, is possessed with chipper camp-counselor pep. (Yes, she really used to run a summer camp.) She can’t help but encourage the audience, creating an oddly supportive atmosphere among strangers. Feeding her audience participants props and lines, she gets everyone right where she wants them, cheering for the volunteers like they’re the underdog team at a sporting event.
This toggling between levity and vulnerability might feel familiar, bringing to mind the work of comedian Hannah Gadsby, who is the show’s thoroughly involved presenter. Gadsby first saw the show in Edinburgh and has attended most nights of the New York run. Wambaugh says she was influenced by Gadsby’s work, specifically the show Nanette. “I found it so exciting. And there was so much debate. Like, is this comedy? Are you allowed to make us feel a different thing in comedy? It was one of the first times I really thought that maybe this was something I would like to do.”
Juxtaposed with many of today’s cynical, edgy comedians, Wambaugh might read as the Kidz Bop version of an art form that is becoming increasingly subversive. But what Wambaugh seems to be interested in is making us feel marginally better, maybe even marginally more hopeful. And that, too, can be an objective of comedy. “Being a parent makes me really committed to that now. I am tethered to the hope that things can be good and people can be good in a way that comes across in my comedy.”
So when she arrives at her grand finale, and asks the audience to join her in song, they do. “Each show is different in how responsive they are and how fast they are to get on board, but that’s fun for me,” she says, like the optimist she is. “It’s okay if it takes a minute for it to happen, because that’s kind of the point of the show. Like, what if you tried?”