The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with nearly 3,500 shows. This year, Playbill is in Edinburgh for the entire month in August for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!

For as long as she could remember, Ruby McCollister has longed to be a tragic girl. In pursuit of peril, she paved for herself many lamentable paths, many different types of girlhood: ghost whisperer girlie, cocaine chic girlie, girlie-friend to a "passionate" French liberal arts student. 

In her one-woman show, Tragedy, McCollister clicks through a slideshow, the herstory of this melancholy pursuit, from her "crypt"—where she wears a white nightgown, twirling a black ribbon and tossing her wild red hair. Half her face obscured by projection, McCollister bursts into song sporadically, giving a TED Talk Hamlet's Ophelia wishes she could have witnessed. 

For all the premature death, drug addiction, dumb criminality, and consumption that comes with tragedy, McCollister's performance also carries the message that tempting fate is no way to really live. 

Somewhere along her daily journey of 20,000 steps, McCollister shared with Playbill the calamitous challenges and mournful rewards that come with being the Fringe Festival's "preacher of Tragedy." 

How long have you been working on Tragedy?
Ruby McCollister: I first performed a completely improvised version of the show in February 2022 in New York. I’ve performed it and workshopped it about seven times since then. The show most recently, thanks to the help of my director, Casey Jane Ellison, took on a far more structured and precise shape. For a while, it was me really trying bits out and attempting to lace them together. Casey saw that version and saw the potential for it. She absolutely pushed the show to the next level—to a degree at which would have been impossible to do by myself.

What has been the most difficult part of performing at Fringe?
The most difficult part is well... doing it every day. You're, like, walking 10 miles every day and doing a solo show by yourself. You're burning, fully, 20,000 calories a day. And I'm not rolling up to putz about on stage! I'm, well, giving you a fireworks show, people. Full scale entertainment (unfortunately)—American style. In short: it's exhausting.

What has been the most rewarding part of the Fringe?
This whole experience is so intense that once you find the true joy in it, realize the sheer magic of just being in this saturated space in time with these people, that itself becomes the reward. When you can finally see the true fun in it, after you get through physical, emotional, and psychic exhaustion, and drop all that, and have a good time. It's a psychedelic, pseudo-spiritual test, really. I hate to sound so terribly trite. But hey, it's how I feel.

How do you hope audience members see you when they hear your story—as a cool girl, a tragic girl, a cozy girl, a dumb criminal, or as some other type of girl entirely?
I want to be seen as an expert of Tragedy, the diviner of Tragedy, the preacher of Tragedy.

You have an incredible voice, and the musical moments of the show are some of the more joyfully mad. How did you decide to incorporate song into your tragic tale?
Thank you for saying I have an incredible voice! As I discuss in the show, I was raised in the theatre my father ran in Los Angeles. And this theatre produced many one-woman shows a year, to the point by which I believed every woman eventually pens her own "one-woman show."

So, since I was a child, I knew I had to write a one woman show eventually. Then, I began performing comedy. Then, over the pandemic, I realized I had still never done a one-woman show. It was that time when mortality was really looking at us dead in the face and I was like, “Well girly, you said you would always do this so, you better do it!” I booked a date at a venue and gave myself the challenge to make the show.

One of the songs I always wanted to sing in my one-woman show was “Duchess” by Scott Walker. It has been one of my favorite songs for years. The first thing I knew about Tragedy was, “I want to sing ‘Duchess’ on stage.” So much of Scott Walker's music is deeply inspirational for me. His music is some of the most baroque and generous and sad and yes... tragic sounds on the earth. And I then coordinated other songs determined by the material of the show. 

Also, including songs that I’ve made up is more part of how I have always performed. Song and singing (namely) acapella has always been a part of my on-stage routine. Playing with musicians and tracks are far newer to me, and I have had amazing guitarists play with me for other iterations of the show, namely, Nate G and Jack Kilmer.

One similarity I noticed between the tragic women/cool girls you highlighted was that all of them were, throughout their lives, visually captured by men (in photographs, on film). What do you think is the relationship between these ideas of tragedy or coolness and the male gaze?
I talk about women who have been captured and rocked by, namely, the Hollywood or "fame" machine: Edie Sedgwick, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Payton, Karen Carpenter. I think the more you are objectified or just observed on that level it's incredibly hard not to be tragic in some way. The gaze in general turns us tragic, which is why so many of us, I believe, have such an addiction to Tragedy now—because we are living in a constant state of self and mutual surveillance.

I also think that's why as a culture, we are obsessed with more tragic or tabloid-y stories—because we see something of ourselves more and more in these stories of tragic women. You don't have to be an actress to feel like a tragic actress. We all feel a little tragic now.

I don't know if it's inherent to the male gaze but the gaze in general. We have the omniscient feeling of being constantly observed in this contemporary culture, and I really think that's what broke all these girls I talk about. I think they couldn't take being constantly surveilled.

Ruby McCollister: Tragedy runs at Underbelly Cowgate until August 27. For tickets, click here.