By Jonathan Turner, Hola America
Erica Salas had her first play performed two years ago in Chicago and now plans to take it to the largest arts festival in the world — the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.
The daughter of a Mexican father and Indigenous mother, she’s been accepted to the massive fest in August, and has a GoFundMe campaign to help raise funds needed for her 13-member cast to go and stay there 10 days. As of April 26, she’s raised $2,715. Salas is the writer, director, and producer of “Never Not Murder,” a comedy in the style of 1940s film noir, combined with the inspiration of Wes Anderson’s film and narration style.
“The chance to participate in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is an incredible opportunity for any artist. It truly has the potential to be a career launchpad. (i.e., Fleabag & Baby Reindeer!),” Salas wrote for her Go FundMe. “So, I’m determined to make this dream a reality for myself and my cast.”
“Having success career-wise, it would be an amazing thing to happen,” she said recently of going to Edinburgh. “I know this is an incredible opportunity for a lot of reasons, exposure being one of them. The experience just to have that on a resume and be able to say that that’s something that we performed at a play that I wrote, to run there and then ultimately, fostering an international community.
“I think we have a really great comedy community in Chicago, and I want to be able to bring that energy and bring that kind of energy and have other people experience it and be curious and see also kind of what other countries, their senses of humor might be and see what we can learn and who we can meet,” she said. “We do have the opportunity to have journalists come and review the show and that kind of thing. Publishers come and watch the show.”
A 32-year-old native of Sterling, Ill., who’s lived in Chicago over 10 years, Salas has only been involved in theater and improv about four years.
“After the pandemic, I had some pretty bad social anxiety, and I was trying to get out of that. And my therapist actually recommended improv classes,” she said recently. “That kind of started everything.”
“I stuck with it. I met some really, really cool creative people and I just kind of found where I feel like I belong and going from there, really,” Salas said.
“I feel like all the things that I’ve learned through comedy and improv and writing and expressing myself are things that maybe in other ways I would have struggled to kind of navigate,” she said. “And that’s definitely been something that’s kept me grounded while I work through whatever it is at the time.”
While she’s mainly worked in commercial lending and mortgages, Salas briefly worked for the Pinkerton detective agency in Chicago, which partly inspired her play. “It definitely felt like something I could maybe draw from,” she said, noting she also loved a film noir parody on the series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
“I thought it was so funny and so creative and I thought that that was just a fun genre to kind of write about,” she said. “It started out with just writing a few scenes here and there, more as a sketch. And then I kind of just got sucked into it and just kept writing about this world that I’ve built.”
Salas admires her improv veteran friends.
“People that do that often, I’m so like in awe of them. I love watching my peers doing that,” she said. “The thing that really like scratches a part of my brain that I really enjoy is writing, and writing sketch and this play and that kind of like gets out that creative urge that I have. And I think really writing sketches is kind of where my heart is more than anything.”
In 2024, she penned “Never Not Murder” and was fortunate to put it on stage at The Annoyance Theatre in Chicago. She first took improv and writing classes there, and performed her first improv there in spring 2023.
The story is set in 1944 New York, following the detective Frankie King, who’s the only straight-laced, clean cop in the city. “The story kind of follows him falling in love, navigating betrayal, love triangles, and then ultimately kind of trying to keep a corrupt big wig in the city of New York from winning the mayoral campaign,” Salas said. “There’s a lot of kooky characters that we pick up along the way. And there’s one death in the show, and we’re kind of trying to figure out how Frankie figures it out.”
“We know as the audience, and we use the narrator to help us, take us on that path. So the narrator will break the fourth wall, talk to the audience,” she said. There’s a femme fatale character, Lucy, who’s involved in the murder.
The play title is a funny nod to the chaotic nature of New York, Salas said. “It’s mostly like we find out that there’s a lot of things going on in New York City. And one of those things, it’s never not murder.”
In Chicago, the play ran for three months, with two different casts of 13 each, and Salas directed.
Going to Edinburgh Fringe has always been a dream, she said.
“It’s definitely, I think, something for artists of any kind. That’s like a huge goal and amazing opportunity,” Salas said. “It really kind of came spur of the moment…I submitted the show to a few venues and I heard back from three of them, and ultimately I chose one really great venue. So we get an opportunity to perform for a week every day, which is really, really exciting.”
She’s never been abroad, though a few of her cast have attended Edinburgh Fringe.
“It’s a huge event,” she said, noting it attracts about 3 million attendees during the month of August. “They’ve got around like 50,000 performers each year, and there’s thousands of venues to choose from. And each venue will fill their entire day with shows. It’s one of the largest global events in the world.”
The total costs for her cast for everything is $36,000, and they plan to go regardless of how much they raise. For more information on her play, click HERE.
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