A genuinely unusual piece of live theater is making its way through regional venues this summer, blending spoken word storytelling, live folk music, and deeply personal Southern Gothic memory into a single, haunting performance. Room to Swing an Ax, officially billed as an Audio-Biography and Southern Gothic Song Cycle, pairs Rutgers creative writing professor Alex Dawson with award winning folk musician Arlan Feiles for a two man show that has already drawn genuine critical attention for how effectively it fuses narrative and music into something entirely its own.
The show operates less like a traditional theatrical production and more like what its own creators describe as a feverdream hoedown, built entirely around Dawson’s real life childhood growing up on an isolated, allegedly haunted horse farm in rural Alabama. Rather than softening that material for the stage, the performance leans directly into its most intense and often brutal family memories, covering everything from snakes and ghosts haunting the family property to a specific, harrowing account of Dawson’s stepfather striking him with a splitting maul. That willingness to sit inside genuinely dark, unresolved material rather than smoothing it into a tidier narrative arc is precisely what has made the show resonate as strongly as it has, and it’s earned Dawson direct praise from celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates, who has described him as a riveting, one of a kind storyteller.
Structurally, the show relies on a genuinely seamless back and forth between its two performers. Dawson delivers the spoken word narrative himself, bringing real theatrical flair to material that could easily overwhelm a less controlled performer, while Feiles backs that storytelling with ten original biographical ballads performed live on guitar and harmonica. Rather than functioning as separate acts loosely stitched together, the music and narrative alternate and interlock throughout the performance, with Feiles’s original songs serving as direct musical extensions of the specific memories Dawson is recounting on stage, giving the entire piece a genuinely unified, immersive feel rather than the disjointed quality that can sometimes plague shows attempting to combine music and monologue.
The duo is currently touring Room to Swing an Ax across a run of regional venues this summer, giving audiences across the broader Northeast several distinct opportunities to catch the performance live. The tour stops in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania on July 25 for a performance at Orange, Coffee, Art, Music, before heading to New Jersey on July 27 for a stop at the Ocean County Library in Toms River. The tour continues on July 31 with the show’s Philadelphia premiere, marking a significant milestone for a production that has clearly built real momentum as it moves from venue to venue this summer.
For audiences drawn to theater that takes genuine creative risks, blending memoir, music, and unflinching personal history into a single sustained performance, Room to Swing an Ax offers something considerably more distinctive than a typical summer touring show. Its combination of Dawson’s raw, theatrically delivered storytelling and Feiles’s original biographical songwriting has already established the production as a genuinely singular piece of regional theater, and its upcoming stops in Delaware Water Gap, Toms River, and Philadelphia give audiences across the tri-state area a rare chance to experience it in person before the tour moves on.
