She wheels onstage perched on a unicycle, dressed in a fetching burlesque-ish getup, and proceeds with witty banter, winning charm, and some serious circus skills to transfix us with an intimate immediacy that compares to any of DC’s top solo shows. This singular artist, Lucy Eden, has come to town during WorldPride from California’s Bay Area, where she typically performs her one-woman comedy juggling act out on the street and the piers. Her extensive background busking has evidently honed an uncanny talent for connecting with an audience — a transcendent experience not to be missed.
In Spooky Action Theater’s church-basement black box, we are thisclose to a flurry of blades in the air as Eden juggles cleaver-sized knives with disarming ease. Her gregariousness is infectious; she blithely elicits our response in vocalization and applause, and we readily oblige. She has us in the palms of her exceedingly dextrous hands.
While balancing a knife on her nose, she twerks. While catching a ball on her foot, she puns. While jumping rope on a unicycle, she prompts us to clap to the tempo. The tricks are precisely paced (Elizabeth Dinkova directed), punctuated by startling light effects (designed by Sage Green), and subtly underscored by scene-setting sounds (Navi). The production is tight, the tech is just right, and the tricks are terrific.
What quickly becomes clear is that Eden is as extraordinary a communicator as she is a juggler, and her concentration doing both is mesmerizing. Her jokey byplay with members of the audience is a recurring delight. And no matter how many objects she’s got aloft — multiple balls, all that cutlery — her eye contact is fascinatingly always with us, the audience. Her perception of whatever she’s juggling is all peripheral; her sense of where and when to catch and toss whatever appears to derive solely from persistent practice and self-taught intuition. Our eyes may be on the balls; hers are ever on us.
This remarkable bond in our beholding — this perceptual reciprocity between soloist and us — becomes the foundation for an autobiographical and political passage in the show that is breathtakingly transformative.
Eden grew up in the rural South, always wanting to be a girl. Having “failed at so many versions of masculinity,” as she says wryly, and having survived episodes of depression and violent self-harm, as she describes soberly, she mustered the courage to reinvent herself. As she shares her story with us, it lands like a triumph.
In a sort of second act, Eden pivots to talk about anti-trans animus and drag bans as now amped up by Trump and his chumps: “It’s about making our existence a joke and a crime,” she says. At age 40, Eden tells us, she has outlived the average lifespan of trans women.
And in what amounts to the show’s astonishing third act, Eden expresses how “trans experience for me is profoundly joyful.” She steps behind a screen and, in silhouette, slips into a low-cut sheath, which, as she moves sensuously and juggles three balls carressingly, falls sleekly from her shoulders. It is a scene stunning in candor and personal power.
Running Time: Approximately 75 minutes, no intermission.
Circus of the Self: A Show About Queer Joy, Juggling & Identity plays through June 6, 2025, presented by Spooky Action Theater performing at the Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets online (general admission, $35; students with ID, seniors 65 and over, $30). A limited number of tickets (6) are available at $15 online for all performances. The venue is currently not wheelchair accessible.
Circus of the Self: A Show About Queer Joy, Juggling & Identity
Created and Performed by Lucy Eden
Directed by Elizabeth Dinkova
Sound Design: Navi
Lighting Design: Sage Green
Floor Logo Design: Barrett Doyle
Production Stage Manager: Maria Mills
Ass’t. Stage Manager: Jasper Weymouth
Associate Producer: Gillian Drake
Production Manager: Lauren Janoschka
Content transparency: Contains frank discussions of transphobia and mental health; short scene with upper-body nudity.
SEE ALSO:
Spooky Action to present ‘Circus of the Self’ in conjunction with WorldPride (news story, April 20, 2025)
