Lions
The Proscenium at The Drake
302 S. Hicks St
Philadelphia
Sept. 20, 2025
This show is part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, which is running now through Sept. 28. Find out what else is showing this month through FringeArts on their calendar here.
“You need to make a dark joke about bike accidents!” Scott said to Alice after her father suffered another bike related injury landing him in the hospital. In Lions, a show about the waiting period after hospitalization and before a parent’s death, to-dos are the rhetorical and emotional glue.
Scott Sheppard and Alice Yorke are the co-creators of Lions, a play that was staged at the Drake Theater as a part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival this year. The show explores the loss of the artists' respective fathers, probes their most human qualities, and asks what it means to live a good life.
In Lions, Sheppard and Yorke create comedy out of the bureaucratic banality of death. The show starts with the duo taking stock of their fathers’ legacies by unpacking the belongings of Alice's dad as he lies in his deathbed. Upon entering the stage, they unbox storage containers filled with shoes, helmets, records, papers, candles, and a small Christmas tree. They proceed to arrange them all on a long table center stage with chairs at either end. They closely examine each object as though fulfilling yet another one of the absurd tasks required in processing and preparing for someone's death; they even appoint themselves the “clerks of death,” referring to how they must handle not only the emotional weight of a whole life lost but have to deal with paperwork, phone calls, wills, medical red tape, and the drafting of countless lists of endless to-dos.
This experience of waiting, taking stock, and looking for clues in boxes is familiar to many. Losing a parent is relatable, and Lions reminds the audience of this early on: “If you don’t now, you’ll have [a dead dad] soon," is a key line in the script. Still it's highly personal too, as the experience is yours alone. This conflict between the intimate details of death, and the universality of its experience are put on display with a series of lists.
At first, lists of to-do's provide guidance in times of uncertainty; sitting among her father’s things, Alice frantically makes a list of what needs to be done. She writes with a quill, joking about how preposterous it is that we are forced into formalities and funeral preparations during our darkest moments of grief. The costuming pushes this formality to the extreme, adding structure and absurdity to their stage presence: Alice wears high waisted white trousers, a dapper coat complete with tails and delicate red little slippers. At various points throughout the show, Scott and Alice don a bowler hat.
Sneaky shots from the back row of the show...
Much later in the show, a more abstract and unfinishable to-do list lays bare the universal absurdity of death and grief. After receiving the call that Yorke's father has passed, she makes a list of the incomprehensible and necessary steps of the modern grieving process. “We need to craft the Facebook post. I need to get really angry at my aunt for saying he’s a butterfly now. Start to forget things about him. Get older," she enumerates. The list shifts from the “we” the pair used throughout the show towards personal tasks, then pronoun-less actions.
Finally, the most personal list is one that's left on the computer of Yorke's father, marked “for my children in the event of my death,” which cathartically concludes the piece. There are two lists in that letter: one of his disappointments, and one of his best moments. Yorke reads the first list as Sheppard begins to pack up stage's set behind her: “Always being the last guy chosen for pickup baseball, deserving to be chosen last for pickup baseball. Going through the first two thirds of my life letting myself think there was nothing special about me. Using that as an excuse not to accomplish anything special.” Then, a recording of her voice reads out the second list, leaving us with a charming list of life’s small and supposedly inconsequential joys like, “making Eve laugh so hard she peed into her boots,” my personal favorite.
The care, humor, and insight Lions brought to this morbid topic earned them a standing ovation from the audience. The show offered the audience anarchic examples of how we can each make sense of and articulate unspeakable emotions; throughout the show, the catharsis of song, movement and laughter are all lauded as valuable resources in difficult times. By leaving us with a list of one man's honest let downs and hidden treasures, Lions reminds its audience to take life as it comes, and to not take the to-dos too seriously.
