A play and actor with roots in South Canterbury are set to take to New Zealand’s largest open access arts festival next month.
Former Timaru actor Kate Low will be staging five performances of her acclaimed show How to Build a Gate at the New Zealand Fringe Festival in Wellington from February 17-21.
Low, a graduate from the New York-based Atlantic Acting School, debuted the play in 2024 with a tour around South Canterbury and the wider South Island.
Since then she has staged the play in New York at the Spark Emerging Artist Festival and then made the final of the prestigious Soho Playhouse Lighthouse Series last year, making her off broadway debut in the process.
Low said it was exciting to be bringing the show back to New Zealand.
‘‘I think I was always keen to bring the show back to New Zealand at some stage and it just kind of worked out that I was going to end up in New Zealand after being in the [United] States for a while.
‘‘I knew I wanted to do the show here and Fringe just felt like such a natural fit for it. We kind of toyed with the idea of Edinburgh Fringe as well, which is still maybe on the cards at some stage.
‘‘We were like, why don’t we start where the show started itself and do New Zealand Fringe? Then we applied for that and were super thrilled to get a season there and put it up.’’
She said the show had progressed a lot since 2024.
‘‘It’s been fascinating to work on a show for this long. It’s probably the longest development I’ve done on a show and it’s grown so, so much in the time that I’ve worked on it.
‘‘It came about because I was coming back to New Zealand and was really keen on doing a show. I had a fantastic friend in New York who’s a writer and I was like, ‘hey, do you want to write me a show?’ And she very kindly did.
‘‘She wrote it, I think in about a month and a-half, which is insane and anyone who’s a playwright will think it’s insane as well.’’
The first iteration was a true one-woman show, she said.
‘‘I was so fortunate to work with Benjamin Donaldson on it, who created the first HAL robot and then was the tech operator for it. We recorded all of HAL’s lines and it was my voice speaking to me on stage basically, which was bizarre.
‘‘What has been so cool with the development of the show, let alone the development of the concepts and the story itself, has been bringing on another actor.
‘‘Megan [Piggott], who plays HAL now, has completely transformed the show. It’s so nice to actually have another actor to play off in the show instead of just the pre-recording of your own voice and it’s really elevated the material itself.
‘‘They’re actually coming over from New York to do the show with me, too. There’s something fun about having a real life person offstage playing an AI character because AI is out here taking all of our jobs and we’re taking its jobs for this one.’’
Low said they had launched a crowdfunding page to help with costs for bringing the show to the festival.
‘‘There’s some wonderful funding around, but there’s also just relatively limited funding for artists. So we kind of turned to crowdfunding to make it happen.
‘‘A lot of it is production costs but also helping the team come over from New York. It didn’t feel right not to have them here when they’ve been such an essential part of the development of the show.
‘‘Most importantly it helps pay our team in New Zealand a stipend for working on it because paying artists for their work is important. We have Peggie Barnes as our New Zealand producer and Liv Pettitt as our marketing person.’’
Anyone wishing to support Low and the production can do so by visiting How To Build a Gate – NZ Fringe | Boosted | Crowdfunding Arts in New Zealand
