“a total powerhouse. Carolyn’s story deserves a Netflix series in its own right. “
****
In a small basement room of a well-loved pub, to an enthusiastic eight-person audience, Carolyn Castiglia presents a one-woman show about “guns, violence, sexual abuse, the Catholic Church, the US military-industrial complex, woodchucks and figure skating.” Everything, as the tagline goes, that “makes America great.”
And it is a distinctly American tale. The scale, the drama, the sheer velocity with which things escalate. As a Brit, this can feel like a world that only exists through carefully produced true crime podcasts and rolling news coverage of a country that, from this distance, can feel closer to reality TV than reality. But here is Carolyn, giving her own impassioned account of a horrific drama she never chose to be part of.
And that’s the central theme: how generational trauma echoes through families, hitting some harder than others. Usually the women and girls left to pick up the pieces. Is the source of the destruction her grandfather Chuck, who committed a horrific murder-suicide, or the many-layered systems that enabled him and still protect his memory today? The answer, of course, is a terrible combination of both.
The subject matter is important, poignant and powerful. Castiglia does an excellent job of weaving the personal with the political, the historic with the present. Her self-awareness, and the awareness she extends to the audience, keeps the room on side: “there’s no wrong reaction to the murder-suicide show.” The laughs, gasps, shaking heads, giggles and tuts attest to this. The time passed quickly and I would have happily listened for double the run time.
Carolyn is a total powerhouse, though the show might benefit from tighter writing and more curation to hit more polished heights. Some jokes don’t quite land, or aren’t given room to breathe, likely a symptom of how much chronological admin the narrative has to carry, which sometimes leaves the pay-off feeling smaller than the run-up demanded. The bones of the story and deeply critical cultural analysis are absolutely there, and Carolyn is the person to tell it. It’s the adaptation into a 1-hour comedy that can leave it feeling a little overstuffed, which is not the worst problem to have.
‘CHUCK’ has a lot to say, and Carolyn’s story deserves a Netflix series in its own right. Seen through the eyes of a toddler playing with Weebles (they wobble but they never fall down), a child pressing bullets in her grandfather’s basement, and finally an adult woman searching for answers, the show carries layers of trauma, resilience and hard lessons about male violence as a means of control. CHUCK is a rough gem still finding its final spectacular form. But please, for all of our sakes, keep telling it.
Carolyn Castiglia: CHUCK
Lower at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Canons’ Gait
8-30 Aug (Not Weds) | 21:30 (1hr)
Carolyn Castiglia: CHUCK ****
Published on
Edinburgh Fringe 2026 
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