Adding Up America: Solving the Race Equation - Edinburgh Fringe Interview

In our ongoing Edinburgh Fringe 2026 interview series, we are speaking to artists and creatives who are bringing their shows to the Scottish capital this summer.

In this interview, we speak with Monique DeBose about her show Adding Up America: Solving the Race Equation.

Photo by Ki Price

What can you tell me in your words about your show?
I grew up mixed-race in Los Angeles - Black father from the segregated South, white Irish Catholic mother from upstate New York - and from the time I was very small, everything in my world was either Black or white. I became a mathematician because numbers made sense to me in a way that people didn't. One plus one is always two. You can't argue with that. Race, I discovered, does not work that way - but America keeps trying to make it.

The show is about all the equations I ran to survive that. Who to be at my dad's family reunion versus my mom's. Which box to check on a form when it clearly says check one. Whether to choose the man my heart wanted or the man my calculations told me made sense. I put those equations on a board and I show the audience my working - the real working, not the version that makes me look good.

It's also a music show. I sing original songs live throughout. It moves fast. People laugh a lot. And then something shifts in the room and they go very quiet, and that quiet is my favourite part of the whole afternoon - because that's when I know they've stopped watching my story and started seeing their own.

I'm an American woman living in London now, performing this show in Edinburgh, and the distance has given me a perspective I never had before. America looks very different from here. And I think British audiences are going to recognize more of themselves in it than they might expect.

Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Honestly? A tumor.

In 2016 I was diagnosed with a desmoid tumor in my abdominal wall. The biopsy happened to fall on the same day as Donald Trump's inauguration, which tells you everything you need to know about the state of my nervous system at the time. When the doctors offered me surgery and medication I said no - because I had a hunch the tumor wasn't a medical problem. It was a creative one.

I sat down and asked it what it needed me to know. And it told me. It said I had been swallowing things for decades - about race, about identity, about who I was performing myself to be for other people's comfort - and all that unexpressed energy had to go somewhere. So it went there. Into my body.

I wrote the show. The tumor shrank.

That story is not in the show - but it is the reason the show exists, and I think you can feel it in every scene.

But underneath that is a lifetime of being a mixed-race woman in America who never fully belonged anywhere — not Black enough for one side, not white enough for the other, doing the constant exhausting mathematics of figuring out which version of myself was required in which room. At some point I stopped wanting to do that math for other people and started wanting to show my own work. 

That is what this show is.

How have you approached developing the show?
The original show came out of my body refusing to stay quiet any longer - I had a desmoid tumor that essentially told me I had been suppressing too much for too long and it was time to speak. So the first version of this show was written under doctor's orders, in the most literal sense possible.

This version required me to go back in and be even more honest than I was the first time. Which, frankly, I didn't think was possible. I had to look at not just what was done to me - the mixed-race kid who didn't fit anywhere - but what I did with it. The choices I made. The calculations I ran. The ways I used race to protect myself that I am not particularly proud of. That is much harder material to write than straightforward injustice.

I also had to think about what this story means in a British context. I am an American woman standing in Edinburgh talking about America -which gives me a distance from the material I never had before. That distance has been a gift. I can see it more clearly from here. And I think British audiences will recognise more of themselves in it than they might expect.

How would you describe the style of the show?
It's a solo show, but not a one-woman show in the traditional sense- there are about fifteen people in it, and I play all of them. It's a jazzy concert, but not a concert. It's a maths lecture, but not a lecture. Every time I try to put it in one box it spills out the sides, which is actually kind of the point - the show is about a woman who has never fit in one box in her life. Stylistically it's fast, physical, musical, confessional and occasionally completely ridiculous. I describe it as comedy that earns its tears.

Can you describe the show in 3 words?
Hilarious. Devastating. True. 

How do you mentally and physically prepare for a run like the Fringe?
I've never done a run this rigorous before so I have been talking to people who have and building a prep plan from their wisdom - which is already telling me I have no idea what I'm about to walk into, and I appreciate the honesty.

The physical side is non-negotiable for me. I walk ten thousand steps a day as part of my regular life so that continues throughout the month. I am researching Pilates studios and swimming pools in Edinburgh because being in my body is not separate from my mental health - it is the same thing. I will eat well, sleep, meditate, journal. The basics. The boring, essential, life-saving basics.

But this show asks something specific of me that a different show might not. Every day I am going to walk into a room and tell the most honest stories I have - about race, about identity, about choices I am not proud of. I go to vulnerable places in this show and I go there every single day. That requires a particular kind of replenishment. So I will also be doing forgiveness work throughout the run. I can be hard on myself - I see what I missed before I see what I accomplished. Having a daily practice of coming back to self-compassion will be what gets me back to center each night so I can do it again the next day.

And I will have a very good playlist for my walks.

Away from your show, what are you most looking forward to about being in Edinburgh?
Honestly? Everything. This is my first Edinburgh Fringe and I am approaching it like a kid at Disneyland who also happens to have a show to perform every day. I want to see as much as I possibly can - I have already been told by everyone who has done it before me that I will not sleep and I will not care.

But beyond the shows, I am most looking forward to the conversations. I relocated to the UK less than a year ago and Edinburgh feels like the fastest possible way to plug into the creative community here - to meet the people making interesting work, find out who is thinking about the things I am thinking about, and discover collaborators I did not know I was looking for. Some of the most important creative relationships in my life have started in a bar at midnight talking about someone else's show. I am very much available for that.

And I want to be inspired. I make work about the human experience and there is nowhere on earth in August that is more concentrated with people trying to illuminate the human experience than Edinburgh. I intend to absorb every bit of it.

Are there any other shows at the Fringe you’d like to recommend?
Pascol- Vocal Performance, August 24-29, 21:15 (50 min) Upper Theatre at theSpace @ Niddry St.
Confessions Of A Mulatto Love Child- August 7-30, 10:10 (1hr20min) Studio at Zoo Southside.

What was the first piece of theatre you saw which had a big impact on you?
I am going to be honest with you, I cannot tell you what the first piece was because my memory is not that organised. What I can tell you is what has stayed with me.

Hamilton stopped me in my tracks because of what Lin-Manuel Miranda did with form. He took the most dusty, inaccessible subject matter imaginable, the founding fathers, and asked what happens if we tell this story in the voice of the people those founders excluded. The concept alone is an act of radical reimagining. That taught me something about what is possible when you refuse the obvious interpretation.

Slave Play hit me physically. Jeremy O. Harris made something that created a sensation in the body before your brain had fully caught up with what was happening. I left that theatre not knowing whether to laugh or cry or have a very serious conversation with myself. That is the kind of effect I aspire to.

And Rent. Rent showed me that the people on the margins, the ones the world is not really writing musicals about, deserve to be at the center of their own story. Told with music that made you feel like you were living inside it rather than watching it.

What those three have in common is that none of them asked permission to be what they were. They just were. That is the thing that moves me in theatre and honestly it is what I am reaching for myself.

What do you hope an audience member takes away from seeing the show?
The show does not end with an answer. It ends with a question because I think that is the most honest thing I can offer. What I hope people take away is not a conclusion but a feeling. The feeling of having been seen in a way they were not expecting. Of having laughed at something that also hurt. Of having sat in a room with a stranger who told the truth and felt, for a moment, less alone in whatever version of this they are carrying.

Race is not just an American conversation. Identity is not just a mixed-race conversation. The specific equations I put on that board are mine - but the experience of performing a version of yourself for other people's comfort, of calculating your safety, of choosing belonging over wholeness - that is everybody's experience in some form. I want people to walk out and turn to the person next to them and say something true. Something they maybe have not said before.

If the show starts one honest conversation that would not otherwise have happened, that is everything to me. If it starts a hundred of them, that is the whole point.

Where and when can people see your show?
Adding Up America: Solving the Race Equation is at Assembly Roxy, Snug Bar, 5 – 30 Aug 2026 (not 12 –13, 17 – 20 & 25 – 27), 13.40. Ticket information here: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/adding-up-america-solving-the-race-equation