House of Waffle
Written by Rhett duPont Vecchio. Directed by Kat duPont Vecchio. Fight Direction by J. Robert Coppola.
Presented by Brooklyn Action Theater.
Presented by the New York City Fringe Festival
April 4 at 8:40 PM, April 12 at 3:40 PM, April 18 at 5:20 PM, April 19 at 3:40 PM, 2026.
The “Runny Eggs Incident” began as a Reddit post in May 2020. A 29-year-old woman, writing into Relationship_Advice, reported that her boyfriend had returned to the same Waffle House cook six or seven times to order runny eggs and been served scrambled, hardboiled, or “egg toast” in their place, and that the two had begun physically wrestling over it, and that the regular customers had started finding this charming rather than alarming. Online commenters diagnosed an enemies-to-lovers dynamic. Brooklyn Action Theater, NYC’s only combat-based theatre troupe, recognized the same thing and did something about it. What Rhett duPont Vecchio has written and Kat duPont Vecchio has directed is exactly the kind of show the Fringe was built for: fast, funny, thin as gossamer on plot, and over before you have quite finished deciding whether you liked it.
Fight direction by J. Robert Coppola structures the action around three combat sequences: unarmed hand-to-hand, rapier and dagger, and broadsword, the three disciplines that constitute the minimum requirements for SAFD Actor Combatant certification. The result is a show with a visible armature, and that armature is clearly a technical showcase as much as a dramatic one. That’s not a complaint. Fringe has always doubled as a proving ground, and there is honest pleasure in watching people do hard things well. What the structure doesn’t yet solve is that the fights mostly exist alongside the story rather than inside it.
The diner setting is where the show’s richest comedy is still waiting. The production gestures at it: the fights incorporate kitchen tools, including what looked from my first-row seat like a live chef’s knife, alarming in all the right ways. Having trained with playwright and screenwriter Qui Nguyen in Hong Kong martial arts fight choreography, a form that treats slapstick as both physics and philosophy, I found myself wanting a larger swing: waffles thrown as shuriken, kitchen implements weaponized against their intended purpose, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd stunt clowning built into the choreography itself, escalating consequences of the “Happy Tree Friends” variety. The rapier sequences in particular have stretches of repeated movement patterns that a sharper comic escalation would fix. The specificity of the setting is the show’s richest untapped resource, and the comedy that lives there is entirely within reach.
Best of all is Caelen Mahoney as Stephanie, whose southern accent becomes, across the course of the show, progressively, specifically, and hysterically more southern, and who commands the rapier sequence against both Logan Shiller as Tanner and Jonathan C. Beckas as the Cook with a precision and personality that the rest of the piece aspires toward. The characters don’t all sound alike and don’t fight alike, and Mahoney is the performer who makes those things inseparable. When she dominates a scene, the audience feels the character winning, not just the actor executing.
What the intimacy choreography in “Heated Rivalry” does, and what Kill Bill and Kung Fu Hustle’s fight sequences do, is use physical action as a direct instrument of psychological revelation. The audience learns who these people are through how they move, not between the moments of movement. Brooklyn Action Theater has the technique for that. House of Waffle makes that clear. The Fringe rewards fast and fun, and the show delivers both. A longer piece, serious or comic, with room for the fights to carry more of the story’s weight, would show what this company can do when the form has space. I cannot wait to see it.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Ariel Estrada.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on April 19, 2026. All rights reserved.
