THE LOST PRIEST
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★½
“What makes The Lost Priest special is its resistance to formula”
I first heard about The Lost Priest not from a flyer or a listing, but at another show. An artist asked the audience, “What else should we see at the Fringe?” Three fabulously dressed patrons called back in unison: The Lost Priest.
As I left that theatre, curiosity tugged at me. I asked if it was their production. They shook their heads—no, we just saw it and loved it. At the Fringe, word of mouth is everything.
Days later, I stepped into a small venue, found my seat, and waited. A piano played something tender. On stage: a man at a desk, a book before him—Jews, God, and His Torah. A candle was lit. Shabbat. But shouldn’t there be two candles? Perhaps one was also lost.
A prayer followed, a chant—what is it called when a prayer is sung? Nusach? Already, the searching had begun.
Here was something rare at the Fringe: not trained projection or polished theatrical voice, but something natural, human. He said Oy vey. The audience chuckled. I smiled at the recognition.
What makes The Lost Priest special is its resistance to formula. At the Fringe, you see countless shows that follow a recipe—reinvented Shakespeare, ironic twists, Star Wars with melancholic villains, musicals about making musicals about musicals that are musical. More shows about witches than witches that were judged. Change the ingredients, and the dish remains the same.
This piece is not that. It is one man questioning, grappling with the traditions he was born into. He is Jewish. And it feels pointed when we drop the -ish. His people: the chosen people. The first to enter heaven. Yet he asks—should I be first to walk into heaven? Don’t we all have the same two legs?
These are the stories families pass down. The rituals we follow, or fail to. He sings, reminding us that Hebrew itself is song. He recalls “Olympic Games” that were neither Olympic nor a game. He reads Shakespeare’s 1596 works and wonders why we did not see antisemitism at that time. He reminds us that humans are the only species that cry from emotion. Perhaps tears are the only way to release what cannot be held.
The work circles back again and again, asking:
What is your religion?
What do you believe?
What defines you? And what makes others want to erase you?
When words falter, they spill into song. And still the question lingers—are we all lost?
We live in a world of DNA kits bought in Black Friday sales, where we discover that we are Russian, not Polish, that our families came to America in 1906, and that they did not perish in the Holocaust. A word too small to contain what it holds. They survived. And survival shapes us, too.
The performance itself feels as if it, too, is searching. A work still finding its form. A man looking for what has been lost. And perhaps what we discover is that we are all lost priests, searching.
Its quiet revelation is this: that we are all chosen, each in our own way, and that all of us carry the weight of suffering, the shadow of atrocity, somewhere in our story. We are all praying for a way forward.
Yes, it is about religion. But it is also about being human. Perhaps this is the priest we all need.
We are told it takes eight years to become a rabbi. We hear of a bar mitzvah that did not happen, and the words that would have been spoken if it had. The words stand alone: unadorned, untheatrical.
And I left the theatre thinking: perhaps the search itself is the prayer. A creation still unfolding, still asking, still searching.
The Lost Priest is a one-person play written and performed by Gabe Seplow, produced by the Chicago-based Orchard Theatre Company, co-founded by Seplow and Julia Grace Kelley. There is something real and fresh about this group. They are searching for something that needs to be found. I enjoyed looking.
THE LOST PRIEST
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 18th August 2025 at Theatre 1 at theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall
by Louis Kavouras
Photography by Julia Grace Kelley
