Jack Holden Stands Alone

Until he wraps performances in Manhattan this weekend, Jack Holden is currently about a nineteen-hour drive away from Skidmore, Missouri, where his one-person play Kenrex takes place. He’s closer to the small, all-American town than ever—certainly closer than he was in Sheffield, where the English writer-performer premiered the true crime play in 2024—and the world of Ken Rex McElroy is only getting clearer, even if Holden jokes, “I wouldn’t dare do it in the Midwest.”

McElroy’s unsolved murder forms the basis of Kenrex, in which Holden performs some three dozen characters accompanied by the musician John Patrick Elliott. A fan of Serial and S-Town, Holden wondered if an “audio-first, true crime podcast on stage” would work when he stumbled upon Skidmore’s dirty little open secret: that a crowd of townspeople watched, possibly participated in, and to this day have kept quiet about the overdue death of its longtime bully, who’d racked up practically every felony in the book by the time of his 1981 shooting. Despite its distinctly corn-fed setting, the crowd-sourced killing is a dramatic formula that has attracted English writers from Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) to Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express).

On a rainy New York day, Holden takes it even further back into his country’s lore, connecting Kenrex to the legend of Saint George and the Dragon. In that story, a village is ruled by a dragon who demands constant sacrifices until a valiant soldier finally steps up and slays the beast. (In return, the English made Saint George’s Cross their national flag.) While writing their play, Holden says he and co-writer Ed Stamboullian realized McElroy embodied “the archetype of the dragon as this otherworldly, evil thing we must sacrifice to; someone the town put up with because he seems terrifying and overwhelming.” It took a while to get Kenrex produced, Holden cheekily notes, until “for some reason, a few years ago, the world shifted around the play, and suddenly a story about a bad man getting away with bad things for a long time and never being held accountable sparked a resonance with some people.”

“There was a version of the play,” Holden continues, “where we humanize Ken and go, But what about his upbringing? We realized this wasn’t the play for that. He’s a baddie. We wanted him to be the antagonist.”

Acting on a theater company’s invitation, there was once also a version of Kenrex that employed a cast of ten, but that idea was nixed, anticipating that theaters would be seeking out smaller shows post-pandemic and realizing, as Holden puts it, “ultimately, part of the spectacle of the solo show is watching me do it all, watching me sweat, watching me run around the stage like a madman for two hours.” A childhood fan of Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, the opportunity to pull faces and vary his voice onstage clinched the format: “I discovered I could do it and was like, Well, let’s just do it then,” Holden giggles. Crafting the script and solo performance enforced a strict discipline on Holden, who worked to distinguish his writer self from his actor self. Is that an acting fix or a writing fix? is a question that often popped up. He’d always try to solve it “with better acting” first, but the process could get messy.

“Sometimes I can make stuff work as an actor that maybe, fundamentally, isn’t actually working on a text level,” he explains—a win for Holden, the performer. On the other hand, “What we spent a long time working on, I’ve got to trust we did for a reason and give it its best shot.” Beating out Bryan Cranston, Sean Hayes, and Tom Hiddleston for Best Actor at this year’s Olivier Awards, the sweat paid off. (The play also nabbed four other nominations, including Best New Play, won another for sound design, and, on this side of the pond, earned Holden a Drama Desk for best solo performance.)

Holden says he’s also written a play in which he could possibly star opposite another performer, though he worries about creating a possible power imbalance. For now, he’s content seeing other actors step into Cruise, his one-person show from 2021 that has since launched productions in Australia, South Africa, and Mexico, with Brazil and Spain on the near horizon. Another eighties-set tale, Cruise was inspired by his time volunteering for Switchboard, a UK hotline for queer people in need of someone to talk to, and loosely modeled after the Odyssey, with a protagonist making his way through London’s Soho gay clubs. Realizing the connection to Homer’s epic midway through the writing process “didn’t make me change it,” he jokes, “but it made me sound really smart when I talked about it.”

Holden sees Cruise as belonging to a lineage of queer, intergenerational English works that seek to keep underserved memories alive, like Russell T. Davies’s series It’s a Sin or Alastair Curtis’s The AIDS Plays Project, which recently published a drama anthology for which he contributed an essay. Holden’s devotion to queer history reached a new high with his adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s seminal novel, The Line of Beauty, for London’s Almeida Theatre last year.

“It turns out adapting your favorite book is actually horrible because you have to butcher it,” he says with a weary but winning smile. “When you love something that much, you think it would be a wonderful tribute to put it on stage—actually, it’s a bastardization of this thing. A whole page of subtext, an actor can just give a look, and that’s done. Other things you have to be way more on-the-nose, and when Alan Hollinghurst himself is beside me in the rehearsal room, watching a scene that I’d taken from his book and gutted and put in a few cheap laughs, it was like, Oh god.” (Holden’s charming self-effacement shines here; the Guardian deemed the play “a class act / elegantly adapted.”)

Holden remembers a Q&A after a performance of The Line of Beauty at which several audience members asked if he’d considered playing the lead himself. “No, no, no, don’t stroke my ego like that,” he replied. Having now signed with an agent in the U.S. and with “lots of writing projects lined up,” he might have successfully dodged that bullet. Still, after years of performing solo pieces (including 2014’s intriguingly titled Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked), he jokes it’s time for a change: “I am keen to act with other actors,” he quips. “It’s been a while talking into the darkness.”

Kenrex continues through Saturday at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York.