We're diving headfirst into the excitement of the 2026 Rochester Fringe Festival! This episode features the delightful Chloe Corcoran, who’s all set to debut her very first one-person show, and let me tell ya, it’s gonna be a whirlwind of humor, vulnerability, and some seriously relatable storytelling. Chloe shares her journey from being an athlete to embracing her truth as a transgender woman, and we get to chat about how that experience translates into her performance. It’s all about finding that sweet spot between laughter and heartfelt moments, as Chloe navigates the ups and downs of writing a show that reflects her life and engages the audience. So if you’re looking for a blend of personal tales and a whole lot of laughs, you’ve hit the jackpot! Don’t forget to snag your tickets for the show on September 19th at the B&L Parlor—you won’t want to miss it!

Mentioned in this episode:

Joe Bean Roasters

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

Go to rochesterfringe.com to get all of your tickets to the shows that you can.

There's tons of shows to go see and I'm here with one of the creators.

Guest.

Why don't you introduce yourself?

Hi.

Thanks for having me on.

My name is Chloe Corcoran.

My pronouns are she, her, and I am excited to come back to Rochester to perform.

I don't get it.

So I don't get it.

Is going to be held over a couple different nights.

So it's September 19th at 2 and a sold out show already on Sunday, September 20th.

Congratulations.

But if you want to get tickets for the 2 o' clock show on Saturday, that is at the mag at the, at the Bauschen Lom Parlor, which is, I gotta say, a fantastic intimate venue.

I don't know.

Have you been in there already?

I actually have not been there yet, so I'm really excited to go in and check it out.

Of course, I've been to the mag before, but this particular part will be new to me.

Yeah, I saw a show there last year for my now friend Joanna who was doing a show called Widow and it was this beautiful.

It's, you know, it's.

It's this art deco y room and you could see it as being lean in some ways, but it's so intimate because you're so close to the performer.

Right.

You're sitting in chairs and performers right there, there's no separation.

Right.

You can, you can feel them in front of you, which is just, I think, a beautiful way to.

A beautiful way to engage with especially the one person show.

So when you're working on creating a one person show, is this your first time writing one of these?

So this is my first time writing one of these.

I have a public speaking business and saw an ad for a writing and performance workshop out here in Los Angeles that was for free.

And I said I can always get better at these things.

So I went and took that and started writing a little bit of a show.

And then the next year I spent building that out into something longer and was accepted to a festival out here in Los Angeles called the Joy who lived where I performed this for the first time.

And I think the show really lends itself to that intimate experience with this storytelling pieces of it.

So I'm excited to hear that about the Bachelom Parlor as well.

Yeah.

And I Think it's, it's something that's.

It's a little hard to define if you haven't gone to a number of these kind of shows, because there is such a variety as well, because it can be, it can be light and bouncy.

Often they tackle personal topics and, you know, personal or, you know, I'd say off kilter topics or something that people don't talk about that much or there's a perception that people don't understand these things.

Well, when you were, when you're working on writing this, because this is, you know, for, in many ways your story.

Right.

This isn't, this isn't.

You're not just mining and like, oh, this is a fictional version of.

This is your story.

How when you're trying to figure out the balance of a show like this, you know, 45 minute, one person show, it needs to have dynamism, it needs to be up and down and moments of levity.

And then, you know, the impactful things need to be impactful.

When you're going through that development process, how did you find that?

Was, was that a challenge for you?

Did it come somewhat naturally?

How was that whole experience?

It came somewhat naturally for me.

And I think part of that is because growing up in an Irish Catholic family, we are going to defer to humor as a coping mechanism almost all the time.

Yeah, that definitely came into play here.

And I really enjoyed the writing process because I do the humor more often than not.

It was harder for me to get vulnerable in a lot of ways, and I'm doing that in this show just to give an idea.

It's basically about my life through the lens of growing up playing football, playing college football, and coming out to one of my college teammates as transgender.

And it'll be interesting because people who knew me in college in that part of my life will likely be at the show.

Oh, wow.

So that's a little bit of a twist on some of this for me too.

So how does that, how does that feel now?

Right.

As you know, and I'm gonna use a term that's, you know, it's not fair or it's not.

I don't know how accurate it is.

Like, you know, as the, as the fully formed version of you.

Right.

You're the fully formed version of Chloe now.

I hope that feels true to you.

It does.

It's taken me a while to get here, so I'm glad to be here.

Does that feel, does that feel interesting to be performing this in front of people who knew the different Version of you.

It does.

It feels different and it also feels scarier.

Yeah.

In a lot of ways.

I mean, I hope they don't boo me while I'm on stage.

I don't know.

Some of those guys may be holding a grudge.

I couldn't tell you.

But it does.

It feels more scary because people will remember these parts of my life.

Yeah.

People will remember how difficult it got.

People will remember some of the dumb slash funny things that I did.

Like, wow, she's still doing that kind of stuff.

She.

She hasn't learned all of her lessons yet.

So fully formed maybe, but not fully educated.

I think we can, we can all.

We can only claim to that as well in our own ways.

So it's, you know, this is.

You've done.

Have you done.

Have you done runs of this already or is this the first time you're performing it in front of an audience?

So I've done one show at the Joy who Live festival out in Los Angeles in Hollywood this past year.

But this will be the first time I'm doing it in its current version.

So I've added some things, I've moved some things around.

I'm trying to give it a bit more color.

I have a bit more time in this performance.

The last one was about 30 minutes.

So there's going to be an additional story now.

Will it be the time I followed a shark around because I thought it was a catfish?

I don't know.

You may have to get one of those last tickets to come find out.

So I'm always intrigued with versions of shows.

Right.

So the process, I always love thinking about that as somebody where if I tried to write this, it would obviously not write this, but write a one person show.

It's such a specific process.

So from the 30 minute version that you did the one off at, you know, with this group of people, what were some of the lessons that you took from that that you know, you wanted to change?

And it's not necessarily that it was negative, that it's like, oh, this maybe worked or it didn't quite work.

What are some of those things that like, oh, I needed to make this more.

For me, it was a little bit about pacing and timing.

I have a tendency to really want to get that story out because I'm so excited, excited about what we're talking about.

So some things will be a little bit more rushed where I could pause a lot more to really draw people into what might happen, what they think is going to happen, and really let them kind of sit with those emotions on their own, too.

I take some of that from the public speaking that I've done where I'm able to kind of adjust to the crowd because I can read on them.

Okay, maybe they don't need all of this information.

Maybe they don't need these statistics.

Maybe they already know and they need to be a little bit more uplifted.

What I did not anticipate from the first time doing this show was any audience interaction or how much they really identified with the story.

Because, sure, I mean, not a lot of people coming to these shows are going to be trans, but everybody can identify with doing something scary.

Everybody can identify with things being difficult.

Anybody can identify with doing something dumb because they thought it was a good idea at the time.

Yeah.

So.

So those are the things that everybody can see some piece of themselves in this.

Because it's not a trans experience, it's a human experience.

Yeah.

And it's just.

It's a timing thing, right.

It's a timing of your growth.

It's a timing of your evolution.

Because I think if you're someone who lives in the world of.

You think about things, right?

You think about, where do I fit in the world.

You think about how do people perceive me.

You think about who's the person I want to be as a fully formed version of myself, you know, and as somebody who is more of a late bloomer in life, you know, it's not obviously the same experience, but learning how to be a social person in my 20s is a very different thing than those where it came more naturally when they were younger.

You're learning at a different time in your.

Your life.

Your learning is a different version of you.

And your.

The hope is that you're growing your happier, better version of yourself as things go on.

I think that's the universal thing.

Right.

That's.

That's.

There's so many universal truths in this.

It's just you.

Sometimes it's just getting people into that mindset of, oh, your experience is different.

Like, yeah, of course it's different.

All of our experiences are different.

That's part of being a human.

Yeah.

And I. I think about this in that a lot of the learning that I've been fortunate to do also goes with some unlearning.

Because there are things in my life that I 100% knew to be true without question.

And it was really hard for me to accept that I was wrong about that.

And I had to unlearn and realize that, okay, there's a lot of gray in the world, if not only gray, in between those blacks and whites.

And I struggled with that because I wanted things to be one way and they just weren't.

And I spent a lot of time dealing with the world in the way that I wanted it to be, in the way that I thought that the world should be, instead of the way that it was.

And part of that was idealistic.

Part of that was stubbornness.

I don't know if part of that was optimism or even maybe some pessimism, just.

Maybe even some anger, but relearning that, okay.

I mean, it seems obvious, but all right, I don't know everything.

And what else can I put out there in the world that allows me an experience to take something in that's new to me?

Well, and I think you really hit the nail on the head with so many of the descriptors you use.

Right.

So many of those things are.

They're the things holding us back from understanding the nuance of.

The nuance of everything.

And this.

Those are.

It's so.

It's so emblematic of where we are right now in just generally where we are as a society.

Is this all of those things, you know, the fear, the.

You know, all those things that are driving so many decisions right now that are loaded, they're affecting everybody, you know, and especially those that are more marginalized.

When you're.

When you're thinking about this show in this time, right?

Because this is not written a decade ago.

You wrote it, you know, semi recently.

When you're thinking about writing a show like this now, where everything is more.

Everything's more loaded, whether or not we want it to be sometimes.

How did you work through that from a balance perspective versus, hey, this is just my story.

And did you.

Did you want a specific message that is resonant to now?

The message that I wanted was that we have a universal experience as humans.

It just comes in different forms and fashions.

And what I like about this type of show is that it can take a little bit longer.

And a lot of our interactions right now are quick.

They're snap, snap.

You can quickly go to, well, you said this, but what about that?

Which is a way to not engage with any topic.

Serious.

And this one, if you're sitting in a room, you're next to, you know, 50 of your now closest friends for the next 45 minutes, you really have to engage.

You have to sit with the material in a way that makes sense for you as a person, not that makes sense for the performer, because once that's out there.

It's out there and you, as the audience, are going to do with it, what makes most sense for you.

But you still have to kind of sit there and take, take it in.

And sometimes it's going to be awesome and sometimes it might remind you of things in your life that you haven't wanted to engage with.

That was most of my life, up until my mid-30s, was, I don't want this to be true.

I'm not going to engage in it.

And one of the things I'm really doing now just in my life in general is listening.

The best part of being a storyteller is hearing other people's stories.

And people have so much to say.

And that's for.

Another great part, is after the show, hearing from people.

This meant this to me because of X.

And it has nothing to do with gender or anything else.

It could be about something completely different.

But I hope people walk away from this wanting to engage in other areas of their life that either they don't know about or maybe they've been hesitant to or were uncomfortable with before.

Yeah.

And you brought up something that I'd say people, it's one of the things they're most uncomfortable with is public speaking.

When you're thinking about, you know, that skill that you've built, right.

It might have been something you were already good at, but a skill that you've built up over time.

You mentioned pacing, and I think that's one of the most.

One of the most transportable things.

Once you learn how to pace and think at the same time and pivot at the same time while still pacing, while still engaging, while still holding an audience at the same time.

How is that skill?

I mean, I gotta.

I found it insanely valuable just in every aspect of life is how to engage with somebody.

Did you find it just the way you do public speaking came into the first performance of this right away, or did you have to turn off parts of the way you do your typical public speaking things?

No, I had to bring public speaking into it because I did not anticipate any comments from the crowd.

It's not really built for that.

But being able to read the room, hear what people were saying, even if it's a laugh, even if it's a situation, sigh.

Even if it's a surprise.

Being able to feed off of that and knowing what to emphasize from that and then how to pause and maybe back up from things even physically a little bit and moving around on stage is something very new to me.

I'm used to Moving in space as an athlete, but not owning a.

It was always a team sport.

There were always other people around that I might end up running into.

Yeah, actually my job was to run into a lot of them.

But this is different because it's a lot.

I don't want to say lonelier, but it's a bit different to orchestrate something as.

Instead of being part of the orchestra.

So that really helped me.

Being able to read the crowd, but also being able to kind of switch things up and if you do get thrown off, be able to recover fairly quickly.

Just wait for the second act where the tackling dummy comes into play.

I'm trying to get one.

I can't bring it on the plane.

We're going to figure that out when I get there.

No, I think it's, you know, it's the.

This is where the subtleties and the subtle differences between the two art forms.

Right.

Just even though you're a single person up on stage doing public speaking, it's not a script.

But it's not.

Not a script.

Right.

You've done it enough times where you know the beats, you know the pivots, you know how to adjust and it's, it becomes.

It's not rote because you're still telling your story, you're telling a specific thing, but it's, it's part.

It's routine.

Right?

There's a routine to it.

There's an understanding.

I think the biggest difference is this.

There's.

There's a.

There's a bigger element of vulnerability when they're going to a show versus, oh, this is a public speaking event.

It's not a show.

Even though it's not.

Not a show.

You know what I mean?

It's that subtle feeling of varying shade of gray where this is just more of a show and there is an element of vulnerability.

Do you feel that is now something you're more comfortable doing?

I am not comfortable being vulnerable.

I just keep doing it and I, I understand.

You know, therapy may be helpful for this specific thing, but it is different.

You know, when I do a lot of my public speaking, I do it for corporations, universities, non profits.

People are either coming to be inspired, to be educated, to learn something, to build community, whatever that might be, but I don't know that they're always coming to feel something.

And I think with a show like this, people are expecting to leave having felt something, that I'm not there to deliver a message.

This isn't to drive your action.

This isn't to get you on Board with anything.

This is just to express.

And I.

Before this, I've never done anything like that in my entire life.

It was always athletics.

There was always competition.

I mean, one of my friends had an arts and crafts party, and I was like, great.

How do you win?

And apparently you don't win arts and crafts.

You just do it to express creativity.

And that was a big moment for me to realize, like, oh, right, you can do these things just to do these things.

And I think it's helping me grow as a person and as a performer.

Yeah.

I mean.

I mean, maybe you're just not good enough to win.

That's okay.

Oh, no.

That she was sparing my feelings.

Oh, my gosh.

Break out the paintbrushes.

No, this is.

It is one of the harder things to do as somebody who struggles with competition.

Right.

Like, I have my very few competitive outlets.

Like, curling's my competitive outlet.

But when I'm out there, like, it's.

I have to turn it, even turn it down, because I. I'm also with a team.

Right.

And it's part of the whole experience.

So what I kind of want to leave with is, are you excited?

Are you excited about the show?

I am beyond excited.

And I know how much I care because of how nervous I am about it.

Yeah.

Especially doing it in my hometown.

That will always be home for me.

And in front of people I know at least some of them will.

Will be people that I love and care about, people in my family, and maybe some new friends in the audience, too.

So when you get those butterflies, at least in my mind, and I've had them for a few weeks already now, that means I really care.

And I'm.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited to get somewhere and see fall colors again, too, and just come home and be in the place where I belong.

Yeah.

And I think that's.

I think it's a sign that if you didn't have any nerves, you wouldn't be doing something that likely matters.

Right.

If it matters to you, you should have a few nerves.

It's not just.

You're not just doing it.

You're.

You're doing the thing.

You're doing the bit.

And I think that's the most important part of these kind of shows is you have to be doing it for a reason.

You have to be doing it to make yourself feel, make somebody else feel.

And if you want to feel things, make sure to go to.

I don't get it.

On September 19th at 2:00'.

Clock.

Don't go to the sold out show.

You can't get in, but you can get [email protected] for the 2 o' clock show at the Memorial Art Gallery at the B and L Parlor.

And Chloe, where can people find other things or news and updates for this show coming up?

Absolutely.

You can find me on Instagram chloecorco C C H L O E C O R C O.

You can also check out my website www.chloe-corcoran.com and you can even reach out to me there.

I have my email address and everything else.

Always happy to chat.

Awesome.

Well Chloe, thank you so much for joining another show on the Lunchador Podcast Network.

Make sure you check out all the shows on the [email protected] really excited for people to check out.

Reader's Advisory.

I think the new first episode should be coming out in the next couple weeks.

Really excited for that and we'll see you out on the fringe.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchador Podcast Network.

I tell you this, I've never seen somebody hit as hard in heels as I've seen Chloe.