Noam Osband will be performing “Circumscribed: A True Tall Tale of One Father, Two Sons, and Thousands of Foreskins” as part of the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival on March 20th and March 21st at 6:35 in the Bloomfield Garfield Activity Center.
I always knew our family’s foreskin tree was unique. No one else in Boston was burying foreskins beneath a sassafras tree. But I never thought I’d write and perform a show about it.
I’ve been performing most of my life. I directed our high school play and in college my main activity out of class was musical theater. I’ve been working as a street performer since 2005 when I first went to Eagles’ tailgates, performing original songs about the team and wide receiver Terrel Owens. One tune so impressed a film crew that they showed it on Inside the NFL where Bob Costas described me as a mix between Carrot Top and Bob Dylan, a comment that I’m fairly sure was not a compliment. Now my main street talent is improvising songs on the spot. Several of my Eagles songs have gone viral, and a few months ago ESPN played a clip to Randy Moss of me singing a song about him. Heretofore unknown life goal met.
I came to fringe festivals later in life. The summer of 2017 I was planting trees in rural Ontario, and one evening, while riding my bike on a remote, empty logging road, I thought to myself, “I wanna bring a show to the Edinburgh Fringe.” It was an idea that had percolated within me for a while, and something about the gorgeous sunset that night inspired me. I kept my vow and one year later performed my first show in a Scottish church basement, an original musical comedy adapted from Wikipedia articles about sex and mating that was entitled Wikipedilove. It was an exhausting and overwhelming month. There are literally thousands of shows taking place during the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s intimidating and enormous and I absolutely loved it. Each day, I’d spend hours on the street hustling to get people into my show, and I really found it enjoyable. Partly because I’m an inveterate extrovert. And partly because I felt like I was exactly where I should be, doing exactly what I should be doing.
I caught the bug. The next year I returned to Edinburgh with a similar show of Wikipedia-based musical comedy, and after that, I began performing in North American fringes with a new show entitled Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour, a satirical tent revival led by a greedy and randy televangelist. To give a quick feel for the show, the song titles included “Cocaine for Christ,” “Hippie-Headed, Hot Bod Jesus,” and “Aint’ No Porno I Know Better than Bible.” It was absurd, bawdy, and silly. There’s a real rush in making a whole crowd stand up, scream Hallelujah, and promise to buy Brother Love’s Christian-themed adult films.
But my new show, while funny, is really different from the other fringe shows I’ve written.
Circumscribed: A True Tall Tale of One Father, Two Sons, and Thousands of Foreskins is my first fringe show that contains any elements of autobiography, or sincerity for that matter. It’s a show about growing up with a father who was a mohel (Jewish ritual circumciser) who buried foreskins at home. It’s a performance about failed efforts at finding paternal figures after my father’s untimely death at age 51, and my own wrestling with the ritual of circumcision when I became a father in 2020. In the show I use family photos, videos, and cassette tapes to tell the story; as part of the piece, I’m fortunate to amazingly have the audio and video of my own circumcision. But while it’s a show about a unique upbringing, it deals with larger themes everyone can relate too: having loveable, eccentric relatives and how we maintain family bonds when we decide that perhaps we want a life different than the ones our parents expected.
This show developed out of a couple things. Firstly, in 2010, I found a letter in my mom’s attic, a letter my father had sent me at summer camp sixteen years earlier that I had saved and completely forgotten about. In it, he explains that stories have gotten back to Boston of my outlandish camp behavior, including telling people that I worship Satan and skinny dipping at the waterfront. To be fair, both were true. I’ve always struggled with limits, and I went through this period in middle school where I joked endlessly about worshipping Satan because it seemed funny to do in my small religious day school.
It’s an amazing letter because it is both very explicitly loving in a way fathers often are not. And it’s also horrible shame-based parenting warning me that stories of my behavior are spreading throughout the New York Jewish community (which is particularly funny given the fact we lived in Boston). To give a taste:
“Noam, you have been blessed with extraordinary gifts. Your intelligence, sense of humor, and curiosity are unusual. A major responsibility that Mama and I have is to help you focus those gifts into a lifelong pattern of behavior that is characterized by compassion, kindness, and sensitivity. Quite obviously we are failing at that task. Far more importantly though, you are failing as well. The reputation you are rapidly acquiring, widely spread throughout the community, will do you serious harm in the future.”
I would read this letter to friends around the dinner who would burst out laughing but also comment about what a sincere, emotionally open father he must have been. Soon, I started reciting it at Mortified, a live show and podcast where people share their childhood writings and journals. This letter slayed, just always getting an amazing response from the crowd. It seemed like there was a there there.
Secondly, around fifteen years ago, I also discovered this picture of my father I had never seen before. In the photo, he’s just performed a circumcision, and now he’s holding the baby on a pillow, feeding it wine off his pinky. He is in a tallis and tefillin, full religious garb. My father is gazing off in the distance with a deep, intense look, and with his face half shaded. The lighting makes it look like a Caravaggio paining of a prophet. Which isn’t entirely wrong. He was a deeply spiritual man, and I loved his intensity. While I chose not to continue his religious lifestyle, I felt fortunate that he gave me a deep love and appreciation for religious rituals and recognizing the magic in the world. This photo seemed to capture that part of him and then I turned it over and saw in writing on the back of it that the photo was from my own circumcision. I was the child he was holding.
It immediately became my favorite photo of him, the one I keep over my desk, meaning that every day I look at this photo of my Dad circumcising me which, maybe when phrased that way, sounds kind of crazy, but is actually a very sweet thing for me, godless as I might be.
Finally, in 2020 I became a father. So much of how I interact with my kids is inspired by my own. I play the same wrestling and tickling games with them, I teach them some of the same songs that he loved, and we share pickle juice from the bottle, something I sweetly recall him doing with us late at night in our kitchen before warning us, “Don’t tell your mother.” I too try to create for my own kids the same atmosphere of wonder about the world that he did, albeit on my own terms. When we go out into the woods on a nature walk, I usually tell my kids to huddle, close their eyes, and listen for a minute. To be clear, my father never did that with me. Instead, he would do things like take us to the mikvah or bring me with him to morning services at the synagogue nearly every day of the week. But to me, those two things are so deeply aligned. Being a dad, I get to think about my father all the time, and I love it.
I decided eighteen months ago I would try my hand at a storytelling show based on this material. It took months of writing and re-writing. I premiered the show in March 2025 at the Rogue Festival, a fringe festival in Fresno, California. From the beginning, audiences have really liked it. It has sold out theaters and won multiple awards. As an artist, I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty gratifying my first foray into long form storytelling evokes both laughter and tears in audiences.
On a personal level though, I didn’t expect quite how meaningful this would be vis-a-vis my own relationship with my father. That sounds deeply naive I know, but I had never really thought about it. I didn’t write this show for personal catharsis. I wrote it to entertain. But in the process, it has been deeply fulfilling to perform around the country, sharing a stage with that favorite photo of my father. He died when I was 20, and you don’t really get to form new memories with the dead. But now I have this new lifeline in my own story with my father. People frequently come up to me after the show to tell me that he sounded like a wonderful father, and I love having a chance to share his deep weirdness and deep love with the world. It seems a fitting tribute to a man who taught me so much about how to live, but more importantly, it makes for a fun, unique, and meaningful evening of theater.
