Camden Fringe: Your Favo(u)rite American Woman

an interview with Ciarlene Coleman

C is an Asian American woman and a history professor’s assistant, now living and working in the UK. She’s an immigrant herself, descended from immigrants, and very eager to please. But just how eager? Ciarlene Coleman’s Your Favo(u)rite American Woman is billed as a lecture from C, told through original music, choreography and a slideshow presentation, with a great deal more underneath its nervous, eager surface than a fresher history session usually promises. It’s the spiritual successor to Coleman’s first solo show, Your Best American Girl, and premieres at this year’s Camden Fringe.

Your Favourite American Woman is described as a spiritual successor to Your Best American Girl. What did that first show leave unfinished, and what made C’s story feel like the right way to pick it back up?

Your Best American Girl was written and produced at a very different time in my life, and in a completely different country. I was writing and performing transparently as my very real self, and I wrote and designed the performance for my hometown audiences in San Diego, California. It, like this current production, focused on Western pop culture and aesthetics I love with the otherness I felt as a 2nd Generation Filipino American in the United States. Although Your Favourite American Woman explores the same themes, it differs in that I created C as a buffer in between my work as the actor and my personal wellbeing as the person; I owed it to the story to allow myself as a writer to dig deeper, and I owed it to myself to make space for the best performance possible and ensuring I was well enough to do it multiple times in a week.

C is eager to please, but the show suggests that eagerness has real limits. How did you find the line between comedy and the darker material underneath it?

Comedy and dark material have always gone hand-in-hand, personally. I suppose my sense of humo(u)r has always naturally gravitated toward finding joy in the absurdity of life (without escaping from the hard truths and emotional work, of course.) Honestly, I think I tend to lean toward dark comedy in my writing because I am no stranger to trauma, and comedy and drama both share the common seed of truth. I always want my work to tell the exact truth, and sometimes it’s more honest to show how funny the truth is.

The show mixes original music, choreography and a slideshow lecture format. What made that combination the right shape for this particular story, rather than a more conventional structure?

All these elements have been consistent with my storytelling from the beginning, all the way back to Your Best American Girl. I never consciously assembled these elements, but they naturally fell together in my writing and became more distinct through the show’s development (shoutout to the rest of the team, my director Sofia Zaragoza and AD/choreographer Alara Koroglu!) The songs came first thing, then I found and formulated the story around the core thread of the music. I think we all found from our previous run at last year’s Lambeth Fringe that the themes of the show were very heady, and C did a lot of teaching, so it made sense to make C into an academic figure using slides to tell her story.

Migration and its echoes across history run through the piece. How much of C’s story is drawn from your own experience, and how much is invention?

C and I share a lot in common: we are both Filipino American women, descended directly from immigrants from the Philippines. We both have experience working in show business and are similarly fed up with a lot of things. However, I chose to give C different parentage than mine, different relationships, and, most importantly, a different point in the process of understanding what a colonial mindset is.

Your Best American Girl won Best World Premiere and Critic’s Pick at San Diego Fringe, and an earlier version of this show had a sold-out run at Lambeth. What are you hoping a London Camden Fringe audience takes from this version that those earlier audiences might not have?

I’m honestly really hoping to 1) present a more polished, tighter version of the show than what we had in October and 2) just get more people to see it, really! We had just two performances in our last run (one preview and one night at the Fringe), so we’re really excited to be able to let the show live on its feet for a while and develop its relationship with more audiences.

Your Favo(u)rite American Woman runs at the Canal Cafe Theatre for Camden Fringe on 11th, 12th, 14th and 15th August at 7.30pm, and 16th August at 7pm. Running time is 50 minutes. Tickets are £15 full price, with a £12 concession available. The show contains strong language, adult themes and partial nudity, and is suitable for ages 18+.

Check out all our Camden Fringe 2026 interviews: