“I’ve never known hate like Christian love”, says a tearful writer-performer Gretchen Wylder in the introduction video to her show 2025 Salem Witch Trial. It’s a particularly powerful statement that deftly sets the tone for the next hour of comedy-thriller, following Wylder’s traumatic entanglement with a Massachusetts Christian community (read: cult).
Wylder gives us some background — she’s an unmarried tarot-reading dyke witch (self-described), and she’s living in the Halloween fairground of Salem, Massachusetts (“Salem during October is like Edinburgh during August”, she explains). For tonight’s show, she recounts her lived experience of being literally and legally harassed, intimidated, and ultimately made homeless by a vicious gang of zealots.
Wylder is a wonderful performer — supremely likeable and watchable, she has a slightly Disney-esque delivery, which works unexpectedly perfectly with the utter horror of 2025 Salem Witch Trial’s story. There’s the odd charming millennialism, too, to keep us grounded in the 2025 of it all (“shooketh!”). Wylder also possesses a BEAUTIFUL singing voice, which gets utilised at various intervals throughout the show, during which she will introduce and outline feminine figures of religious mythology — Asherah, Lilith, Mary Magdalene. All are cherished and slotted neatly into our 2025 heroine’s tale of persecution and escape.
Many, many Fringe press releases love to describe their shows as “radical”, which often translates as “they will say the word ‘cunt’ at one point”: Wylder’s 2025 Salem Witch Trial genuinely is, in the truest sense, radical. She proposes an entire reframing of Christianity and organised religion itself — during the show’s transcendentally empowering and enlightening epilogue, she somehow manages to summarise an entire religion’s history of the “patriarchal bastardisation of women” into an electrifying call for action. It’s incredibly affecting stuff, and all delivered with a lightness of touch and gentle humour that makes you almost forget you’re really watching a sermon, not a Fringe show in the dark, sweaty Lime Studio @ Greenside.
Ultimately, 2025 Salem Witch Trial achieves something not many comedy shows can: a lasting challenge to the audience’s worldview, and a newfound appreciation for the U.S. Fair Housing Act of 1968. Sublime!
2025 Salem Witch Trial is running until 23 August at Lime Studio at Greenside @ George Street.
Buy tickets here.
Image courtesy of Gretchen Wylder, provided to The Student as press material.