Get ready, folks, because we’re diving into the world of theater with a special spotlight on a show that’s sure to haunt your heart—it's called "Ghosted," and it's hitting the stage at the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival! This gem is brought to us by the talented Celeste Walker, who’s here to spill the tea on her mostly true tale of love, loss, and a sprinkle of Catholic guilt, all set in a hotel that might just have some ghostly guests. We chat about how this deeply personal story unfolded through a whirlwind of characters—yes, even a wall gets a voice in this wild performance! So, if you're in the mood for a show that’ll make you laugh, cry, and ponder life’s spooky twists, mark your calendars for March 25th and 26th at Attack Theatre Studios. Trust me, you don’t want to ghost this one!

GHOSTED

Company: Celeste Walker

Date(s): March 25, 2026 - March 26, 2026

Time(s): Various Times

Genre: Theatre

Venue: Attack Theatre Studios - Main Studio

https://pittsburghfringe.org/events/ghosted/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Well, that music means it's time for another episode of Just Can't Not.

I'm your host, Chris Lindstrom, and this is part of our preview for the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival.

I know this outside of the typical Rochester and surrounding area content, but the Fringe is universal, and we're thrilled to partner with the Pittsburgh team for their 13th year running from March 19th to the 28th.

To learn more about all of the shows and get Tickets, go to pittsburghfringe.org Tickets cap out at $20, and an entire event pass is only $150.

So make sure to get your tickets today and join the action over on Pen Ave. And I'm here with a guest.

Guest, why don't you introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm Celeste Walker.

Yeah.

And Celeste is doing a show called Ghosted, which is being held over at the Attack Theater Studios.

Main studio shows are on March 25 at 7, March 26 at 5:30, and also March 26 at 8:15pm Tickets are $20 on pittsburghfringe.org so, Celeste, why don't you tell me a little bit about what the show is?

It's.

It's a mostly true story about falling in love at a relatively young age and getting.

Having a tragic end to that love.

Feeling betrayed, dealing with loss, and then dealing with shame.

Catholic guilt, you might want to call it, because it was an affair and how I grew over the years.

It takes place in a hotel that may or may not be haunted because there are ghosts in and out of the story.

It's actually told through 10 characters.

I played 10 characters, and one of them is a wall, and one of them is another scorned lover who may or may not have committed suicide on a ship on her way to Spain.

I mean, the emotional range it takes to play a wall in compared to, like, other ghostly characters.

I mean, that's a staggering achievement if I've ever heard one.

Well, she's got a lot of.

She's.

She's pissed that she's been stationary for a long, long time.

Oh, that's completely fair.

A lot to say.

What?

What?

That's completely fair.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the.

The.

The ghosts in the.

In the play are helpers.

They're really there to assist my character as she goes through this whole relationship building and an ending.

And then there's a surprise, and then.

I don't want to give anything away.

That's okay.

I think that's.

I think you've set the stage for so many questions.

So my first question is, so this.

It sounds like you're really boiling down.

A lot of.

A lot of life experience, a lot of feeling, a lot of, you know, all that stuff into one show.

When you were developing it, how did you start to.

How did you start to go through that entire experience and say, this is a show and this is how I want to do it?

I had help.

Yeah.

I've done other solo shows, and this one, I had a writing coach who's also a solo artist and a director, and I was going to workshops with her, and we would go through these relaxation techniques and emotional journeys, and then she would give us writing prompts.

And all the writing prompts ended up referring to this affair that I'd had that I went through therapy over.

I mean, it was a long, long time ago.

So it was something I thought I had dealt with, and I have, but it kept cropping up.

So that was telling me something.

It had to be told.

It had to be worked through.

And I just kept building on it and building on it with her, and a lot of rewrites, a lot of editing, and then I did a reading of it to get feedback from people, and then I went back and did a lot more editing.

And I've been working on.

So I've been working, and I still want to edit it.

Every time I do it, I'm like, oh, I have to cut that, or I just want to fix that.

So it's an amazing process.

I never thought I would be a writer.

I always thought I was just.

Just.

I always thought of myself as a performer, as an actor.

But this writing thing, I don't know.

Got something.

Something that really I relate to.

Yeah, there's that refinement process you mentioned is kind of special because it really offers.

That offers that chance to.

Oh, this didn't quite hit the way I wanted.

Like, there's that element to stand up.

There's that element to, you know, know theater.

Because you perform it the first time live with an audience, you might tweak something, or the room you're in, you might tweak something.

So what, you know, from the first time you did it, did you find yourself.

Did you find yourself liking it more as you've performed it, or do you find yourself wanting to adjust it more?

That's a great question.

I. I love the piece.

I love.

I've never really felt so committed to Something that I've actually written and performed, but it just makes me want to do more, and it also makes me want to fine tune it.

I have to do an abbreviated version at another festival in May and June because it's 75 minutes long and it has to be 60 minutes.

So I had to figure out a way to cut.

I think editing is the friend to the writer because the more you edit, the more succinct you get and the more, you know, direct you are with your message.

So I'm not afraid of, you know, refining and editing.

I think it's a good thing.

Some people find what they write very precious, and they don't want to let go of it, but I'm fine with that.

Well, I think that's also an amazing opportunity to.

When you cut it down, you know, more aggressively for a different formatted show that you can learn was the other stuff as necessary.

You know, do you want to refine anything there?

Because that's, like, what an astonishing opportunity that is, too.

Yeah, yeah, That's.

That's what I like about the writing process.

And, you know, the longer you live with a character, you want to make sure that you really get to the point of what they are trying to say, how they're trying to.

The characters are, like I said before, they're helping my character wade through this process of healing and redemption, and they have some pretty interesting bits of wisdom.

They're.

They're.

They're.

They're very helpful.

I never thought I would be doing something where I would have personification in character.

Yeah.

It's kind of what I was wondering about next was when you're using.

Using ghosts as, you know, a core part of a performance, is that something that you have.

You've either, you know, this is part of the way you see the world, or is.

Was this a useful character because a tool to portray history and those things.

How did.

How did you come across that as a function of the show?

I don't believe in ghosts, personally.

Neither does my character, but they became the ghosts, became very useful as vehicles.

And because they're ghosts, they have limitless possibilities of ways that they can function.

And it really allowed me to have conversations in the storytelling, because it is one story, but the conversations are necessary in order to complete the circle or cycle of the.

The.

The growth cycle for my character.

Yeah.

And it's the interesting part of doing some of these fringe interviews is that I've had the opportunity to talk to people who were working through this visceral grief, working through different things through performance.

And there's a question I ended up asking last year that I felt was something I've started to use more often is for this process, and you're showing where you are now was, you know, have you reckoned with it or have you accepted it?

Right, because there's like that difference of, oh, yeah, I'm okay with it, but you haven't necessarily accepted it as this is a thing that is.

This is part of me.

Is that like part of that journey of learning about this and rehashing it at, you know, at a later stage in life, do you find that.

That you have now accepted, you know, the whole experience?

Another great question, because when I revisited this affair, this experience, it was painful.

It was at times I didn't want to go there, and at times it brought it right back into the now.

It was almost like I was reliving it now.

So it was very interesting.

And my training as an actor is, you know, using past to help tell story, using everything that you have at your fingertips to tell a story.

And so it does.

It's a hurdle sometimes, but it's also necessary.

And it's what I do, you know, it's just very personal and universal at the same time, because I don't know very many people who have not had a love affair or a relationship that ended.

And we all learned from those things, hopefully.

And so a lot of people have come up to me.

I've had people say, how did you know what's in my diary?

How did you know what I lived through?

This was so.

And then other people have said, do you really believe in ghosts?

And.

And there's a lot of ways that ghosted is presented in the story.

It's not just the literal ghost, it's other ghosts.

But the.

The process, you know, I've come to terms with the.

The.

The story.

Years ago, I dealt with it.

Like I said, I was in therapy, but it does, you know, bring things up and you remember things when you.

You are meticulous about memory.

The more you remember, the more you remember, the more you remember, the more detail you remember.

So it's.

It was a very wonderful process.

But at the same time, sometimes I just didn't want to be around it.

But once I'm on stage, it's like, I can't wait to tell the story.

You know, I really have fun.

And hopefully the audience, I mean, there are some really, really funny parts and not so funny parts in it.

Well, that's dynamic range, if I've ever heard It.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What I'm kind of intrigued about is you mentioned that performing is more of your typical wheelhouse.

When you were working on performing 10 different characters for this is that that kind of challenge you like is inhabiting characters, working on voices, working on your mannerisms to, you know, show that each character is different.

While you are functionally on stage.

You can't go off for lots of costume changes and lots of other things.

So how do you work through that to develop, you know, develop how you inhabit those characters during a show?

That was part of the process.

I mean, understanding the voice of a character, the posture of a character, the gesture of a character, and it's something that I'm constantly trying to refine because I feel like I need it to be streamlined.

I think when I first started doing the show, I was all over the place.

I wasn't disciplined enough.

And now I'm starting to really get meticulous with certain mannerisms.

And it's.

It's a.

That was.

That was scared me.

And I would say to my.

My writing coach, who became my director, who wrote this, you know, why.

Why does this play have so many characters?

Because it was going to be like a one person, you know, solo show, one person telling a story, and that's not what it turned into at all.

So it was.

It's a challenge.

It's a real challenge.

So I'm kind of intrigued when you mentioned that performing is your main angle.

When did you start performing and what side of performer you're on?

Theater, film, what kind of sides do you typically find yourself and which side do you enjoy

to?

The Actors Studio Drama School at the New School in Manhattan.

I was in their first graduating class, and I'm a member of the Actor Studio, which we had to audition for.

Once we graduated, we had.

Which was the scariest thing I've ever done in my life, and.

And then a member of Actors Equity.

So my training is all theater.

I've done film and I've done TV commercials.

But my love is theater, and I love the rehearsal process.

However, the rehearsal process for a solo show is unlike any other rehearsal process because you.

You can't wait for the character to give you your line.

You are giving you your line.

So I had to hire somebody to help me memorize the script because it was just really, really difficult.

I was cheating too much, learning the script so well.

It's a whole different tech.

It's a whole different technique, too.

You're trying to.

Trying to memorize, you know, an hour 15 show versus you know, memorizing, you know, a monologue or interaction with another person where you're reading body language and, you know, oh, their, their words prompt the next words.

It has to be a whole different technique to remember that much text.

Yeah, I'm a glutton for punishment, you know.

Oh, I started doing solo shows because I wanted to work, you know, and, and there's so much competition for women in theater and I just, you know, I want to do my craft and this is the best way for me to work on my craft right now, especially at this stage in my life.

And I can do this for the rest of my life.

This, Not a lot of careers allow you to do this until you keel over, you know, so well.

Yeah, and I think we've also seen such, you know, even like in film in the last few years, we've seen such amazing portrayals of all different stages of life through these amazing, amazing, talented, you know, actors that have that life experience and they bring that to those sometimes very intense and deep performances.

Now, not just from this particular experience that you are, you know, formatting the show around, do you find that, you know, now you're pulling from all of those, all of your life experiences when you're writing and performing that you're able to, you know, bring a deeper part of yourself to the stage?

I'm much more comfortable with myself.

I, I still am very hard on myself.

You know, we're always, you know, I have a voice on my shoulder, but at the same time I'm, I'm comfortable with who I am and I, I'm not second guessing myself as much.

I feel much more comfortable in my skin.

And that is so helpful, so helpful when you're a performer.

And yeah, you do draw on everything well.

And I think in the end, like the most valuable thing you can be as someone who is either recorded, somebody who does interviews like myself, or is on stage or doing whatever, the most valuable thing you can know is yourself.

And it's, I'd say the single most valuable thing I tell anybody, especially as they're.

You're learning something, is you have to get to the point where you get outside of, you get outside of the, the concern of doing the task and you bring yourself to the thing.

And it's also completely unfair because it's one of the hardest things to do is to be yourself to the highest level.

I think it's, I think age, that's one of the gifts of age.

I really do because it has taken years.

I've evolved into this space.

And I, I used to have the worst stage fright in the world.

Oh my God, it was horrible.

And I had a lot of self doubt, a lot of like, fear.

I, I still did it.

And you know, once the lights came on, I was present, but it's just not the same.

It's a much more in my own self.

I bring my own self fully and authentically to the roles that I'm, that I'm in.

And I don't question and second guess myself like I used to.

Well, Celeste, thank you so much for coming on.

Just can't not to talk about the show.

Can you throw out the plugs again for where the show is, where it's being held?

The Attack Theater Studio, main studio on the 25th and 26th March.

The show on the 25th is at 7.

And then.

I'm a glutton for punishment.

I'm doing two shows on the 26th, 5:30 and 8:15.

And I hope people will come.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll.

I don't know, you'll learn something.

Well, Celeste, this is an absolute delight.

I really enjoyed our conversation.

Is there any place you want people to follow you if they want to check out, you know, this or any other shows you have coming up?

Yeah, you can go to my website, www.celestewalker.com.

all right, well, thank you so much.

I'm hoping to be down for the second weekend of Pittsburgh Fringe.

If you want to check out the other shows on the Lunchadore Podcast network, go to lunchadore.org we're doing content that's Rochester base, but also universal, so check that out.

Really appreciate everybody checking out all of the shows for the Pittsburgh Fringe preview.

We have a whole bunch coming out on the feed, so if you enjoyed this, check out the others and we'll see you out on the fringe.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchroom podcast Network.