There are performances that tell you a story, and then there are performances that make you question what a story actually is. Los Angeles-based performer and multidisciplinary artist Gregory Nussen’s QFWFQ belongs firmly in the latter category.
A surreal, shape-shifting solo performance inspired by Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, QFWFQ is part storytelling experiment, part theatrical puzzle and part deeply personal reflection. It is also genuinely humorous.
Nussen takes the conventions of the one-person show and gleefully pulls it apart, creating a work in which beginnings are uncertain, endings are elusive and the audience is never quite sure where fiction stops and autobiography begins.
That sense of instability is established almost immediately. The audience is drawn into the world of the mysterious Institute for the Posterity of All Things, and from there Nussen begins to construct and dismantle stories with an agility that becomes one of the show’s great pleasures.
Calvino’s influence is unmistakable, particularly in the way Nussen plays with the mechanics of storytelling. Like Calvino, they are fascinated by the relationship between reader, writer and character, but QFWFQ translates those literary ideas into something immediate and theatrical.
Stories begin, fracture, interrupt one another and sometimes appear to disappear altogether, only to return later in an altered form. The effect could easily become self-indulgent or overly cerebral.
It doesn’t, largely because of Nussen’s performance. They are an engaging and highly accomplished performer, able to move effortlessly between comic timing, characterisation and moments of striking vulnerability.
There is a conspiratorial quality to the performance: Nussen seems to be letting us in on the joke while simultaneously reminding us that we are part of the machinery of the show. The audience is not simply watching the story. We are implicated in it.
This is where QFWFQ becomes considerably more than an exercise in postmodern theatrical playfulness. Beneath the jokes and narrative games is an examination of who gets to tell stories, whose stories are believed, and what happens when inherited narratives begin to fracture.
Nussen draws on their experiences of growing up Jewish and queer, moving into territory involving identity, family, history, Zionism and Palestine. The transition from the comic to the confronting is carefully handled, allowing the personal material to emerge organically from the show’s larger preoccupation with storytelling.
There are moments when the sheer density of ideas threatens to overwhelm. QFWFQ is not a show that intends to make everything easy for its audience, and its deliberately fractured structure demands attention. Yet that is also part of its appeal. The work trusts its audience to make connections, to sit with uncertainty and to accept that not every narrative needs to resolve neatly.
Director Hannah Pilkes gives the production enough shape to contain its apparent disorder. What looks spontaneous is in fact carefully controlled, with recurring ideas and images gradually acquiring new meanings. The performance may appear to be perpetually losing the plot, but underneath the chaos is a remarkably precise theatrical construction.
What makes QFWFQ particularly rewarding, however, is that it doesn’t require the audience to have read Calvino. The literary reference provides the architecture; Nussen supplies the heart.
Gregory Nussen’s QFWFQ is an inventive and compelling piece of contemporary solo theatre: a surreal journey through the possibilities of storytelling that manages to be both intellectually mischievous and genuinely human.
QFWFQ
Festival Hub: Trades Hall (Meeting Room), Corner Lygon & Victoria Streets, Carlton
Performance: Thursday 1 October 2026 (6.00pm)
Season continues to 4 October 2026
Information and Bookings: www.melbournefringe.com.au
Images: Gregory Nussen – photos by Sonya Katerina
Review: Rohan Shearn