The Unreliable Narrator's Safari: A Queer Artist's Daring Reinvention of Calvino
Some journeys begin with a ticket stub; others with a single, unsettling question. For Gregory Nussen, the journey that became QFWFQ began with Italo Calvino's 1979 novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, a book that famously begins with the reader trying to read the very book they're holding. It's a hall of mirrors, a literary puzzle box, the kind of thing that makes most adapters run screaming for the hills. But Nussen, a Los Angeles-based performer with a magician's grin and a storyteller's soul, saw something else: a map. A map that leads not to a place, but to the very act of navigation itself.
What Nussen and director Hannah Pilkes have conjured at Summerhall is not an adaptation but a transmission. It's a one-person show that uses Calvino's framework of interrupted tales and unreliable narrators as a springboard for something far more personal and urgent. The title itself, QFWFQ, is the name Calvino adopted as a narrator, a playful acronym that Nussen has repurposed as a kind of secret handshake with the audience. The show is a playful, head-spinning ride through Nussen's own consciousness, where a overheard keyboard workout in a Helsinki church or Keith Jarrett's legendary improvisations on The Köln Concert become metaphors for the freedom and terror of creating in the moment. These are the coordinates of Nussen's mental geography, and we're invited to follow.
The performance's surface is all metatheatrical wit—Nussen breaking the fourth wall, attributing their interrupted tales to obscure European writers, leaving stories deliciously unresolved. But beneath the games lies a fierce political heart. The show's most potent journey begins when Nussen recounts their teenage summer-camp trip to Israel via Auschwitz. It's a pilgrimage that many American Jewish teenagers undertake, but Nussen reframes it as a form of coercion—not just a sacred duty to remember the Holocaust, but a tool to instill a sense of perpetual threat and victimhood. This is where the self-referential tricks fall away, and Nussen's voice turns sharp and raw. They rail against dominant narratives that have no place for them as a queer artist, nor for the 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the foundation of Israel. The stories we tell, the show insists, are never neutral. They are weapons, shields, and sometimes, cages.
What makes this more than a polemic is Nussen's sheer charm. They're a raconteur of the highest order, with a comedian's timing and a poet's ear. The audience at Summerhall, a venue known for its avant-garde programming, is held in a state of suspended animation—laughing one moment, stunned into silence the next. Nussen's ability to pivot from a joke about Calvino's authorial intrusions to a devastating meditation on displacement is the kind of high-wire act that defines the best of contemporary performance. It's not a lecture; it's a communion. And like any great journey, it leaves you changed, your own assumptions about the stories you've been told—and the ones you tell yourself—gently, irrevocably, unsettled.
The rarity here isn't a private villa or a Michelin-starred table; it's the intellectual and emotional access Nussen grants. This is a safari through the savannas of memory and politics, where the big game is truth itself. In a luxury travel context, we often seek out the exotic and the exclusive, but QFWFQ reminds us that the most profound expeditions are often inward. The show's power lies in its willingness to embrace the unreliable narrator in all of us—to question the very maps we've been given. It's a journey that costs more than money; it demands your attention, your empathy, and your willingness to get lost.
For the ultra-wealthy traveler, whose passports are filled with stamps from the Serengeti and the Seychelles, the next frontier may well be the contested territories of culture and identity. The signal from Edinburgh is clear: the most luxurious experience is no longer just a private jet to a remote atoll, but an intimate encounter with a story that challenges you. Nussen's QFWFQ is exactly that—a rare, limited-engagement expedition into the heart of narrative itself, where the only souvenirs are questions. And as the world grows more complex, the wealthy will increasingly seek out these intellectual safaris, guided by artists like Nussen, who dare to take the unadaptable and make it essential.
