By Amina Zamani
What happens when one man decides to stop lying to the world, and then to himself? Spencer Waldner lived through the answer. Now he’s bringing it to the stage in DADDY ISSUES, coming to Hollywood Fringe this summer before transferring to Edinburgh Fringe, a show that will stay with you long after you leave the room.
I don’t come across work like this very often. And when I do, I feel a responsibility to share it.
When I first encountered Spencer Waldner and the story behind DADDY ISSUES, his one-man show coming to Hollywood Fringe this summer before transferring to Edinburgh Fringe in August, I was stopped in my tracks. Not just by the bravery of what he is doing, but by how psychologically rich and carefully considered it all is. The messaging is beautiful. The journey he takes his audience through, from the painful adjustment of becoming radically honest to the freedom waiting on the other side of that, is handled with a level of emotional intelligence and self-awareness that is genuinely rare in any art form.
What moved me most is how deeply this show understands human psychology. The way it holds space for self-reflection without ever forcing it. The way it takes the most private, interior terrain of the human experience and makes it feel universal and accessible. Waldner isn’t just telling his story. He is creating a container for the audience to examine their own. And that, to me, is what the most valuable work always does.
To understand why, you have to understand where it came from.
A Room, Three Weeks, and No Way Out
Waldner’s journey to DADDY ISSUES began not in a rehearsal room but in forced stillness. In 2020, a three-week bout of COVID left him completely alone with nothing but time and his own thoughts. No audience, no performance, no carefully edited version of himself to present to the world. Just the unfiltered reality of who he actually was.
When he came out the other side, something had permanently shifted. The self-censorship was gone. The psychological adjustment that followed was profound and disorienting. He found he could no longer soften, manage, or selectively present the truth in the way most of us do instinctively every single day. “I stopped editing myself for the world,” he says. “From the grocery store clerk to my grandma.”
What followed was messy, real, and costly. He began speaking openly about his deepest fears, his identity, his sexuality. Relationships were tested. Some didn’t survive. In the early stages it felt like he was causing a problem simply by existing honestly. But something remarkable waited on the other side of all that disruption: the experience of being truly known. Not the performance of himself, but the actual person underneath it.
That psychological recalibration, moving from compulsive honesty to conscious choice, from rupture to freedom, became the raw material for DADDY ISSUES. And the beautiful thing about what Waldner did with it is that he didn’t waste a moment of the pain. He turned it into something that could help other people find their way to the same freedom, without having to go through the same fire to get there.
What Makes This Show Psychologically Extraordinary
What drew me most deeply to this project, beyond the personal story, is the psychological intelligence woven through every layer of it. DADDY ISSUES isn’t simply a show about honesty. It is a carefully constructed exploration of identity, shame, self-deception, and the unconscious roles we perform in order to belong, survive, and feel loved. Waldner has done something genuinely rare: he has taken the most interior, private terrain of human experience and made it theatrical without making it abstract.
The show centers on a character who suddenly loses the ability to lie. On the surface that is a dramatic premise. Underneath it is one of the most pressing questions in all of psychology: what is the self, really, when you strip away every layer of social performance built on top of it? Waldner built the show from the rawest version of his own truth first, guided by one principle he returned to again and again: always write what is scary, always write what you’re afraid to say. The hardest part, he says, wasn’t the vulnerability. It was the editing. Knowing what to keep, what to cut, and how to honor the rawness of lived experience without tipping into self-indulgence required its own kind of discipline and courage.
The result moves between dark comedy and something closer to a live therapy session, drawing on philosophical and psychological frameworks and condensing them into their most human, accessible form. It never becomes a lecture. It stays a story. And that is precisely what makes it land so hard.
What Happens in the Brain When We Witness Someone Being Real
This is the part that I find most extraordinary, and I think it explains why DADDY ISSUES has the effect on audiences that it does.
When we witness another person being genuinely vulnerable, something remarkable happens inside us. Mirror neurons, the neural systems responsible for empathy and emotional connection, begin to dissolve the boundary between observer and observed. Empathy with both real people and fictional characters is not a choice. It is an unconscious, automatic process built into every one of us. When Waldner stands on that stage and exposes something true about himself, the audience doesn’t simply watch. They begin to feel it alongside him.
But here is the concept I find most beautiful and most important: asymmetry. When we witness someone else’s vulnerability, we gain access to insight and self-awareness that we don’t have to suffer to earn. Waldner went through years of rupture, loss, and psychological adjustment to arrive at his truth. And yet an audience member can sit in that room, watch him navigate that entire journey, and walk out with a real shift in their own self-understanding, without having had to live through it themselves. That is the profound gift of this kind of storytelling. You receive transformation through someone else’s experience. His journey becomes a vehicle for your own self-reflection.
This is why people leave DADDY ISSUES wanting to journal, start therapy, call someone they have been avoiding, or reconsider things about their own identity and sexuality they had never questioned before. It is not just emotional resonance. The brain’s reward system releases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin when we engage with deeply personal, vulnerable live performance. The experience feels good because the brain is doing exactly what it is built to do: connect, reflect, and change.
And live theatre makes that uniquely possible. There is no screen, no algorithm, no curated distance between performer and audience. When people share a live experience together, their neural rhythms begin to synchronize. The communion Waldner describes feeling with his audience is not a metaphor. The room becomes a shared nervous system, and everyone in it is changed by what happens there. Shows that ask us to witness real human vulnerability don’t just entertain us. They rewire us.
Fluent in Performance, Fluent in Truth
Underneath the show’s central premise is a thread that is more specific, more personal, and ultimately more universal: what it means to grow up queer in a world that teaches you to perform long before it ever gives you permission to simply be.
So much of DADDY ISSUES explores the roles people unconsciously learn to play in order to survive, belong, or feel loved. For many queer people that education begins early. You become fluent in reading a room, adjusting, softening, presenting the version of yourself that causes the least disruption, long before you’ve had any real chance to discover who you actually are. Performance comes first. Authenticity, if it comes at all, has to be fought for.
The coming out thread in the show refuses to be a single dramatic moment. It is an ongoing excavation moving through memory, shame, humor, and honesty, layers coming away slowly rather than all at once. “The show asks what happens when those performances suddenly stop working,” Waldner says, “and whether there’s freedom on the other side of that collapse.” He already knows the answer. He lived through the collapse first to find it. And now he is giving his audience a way to find it too, without having to lose everything first.
The Room Doesn’t Let You Hide
Part of what makes DADDY ISSUES so effective is how deliberately it closes the distance between performer and audience. The fourth wall comes down throughout. The audience becomes Waldner’s therapist, not passive observers but active participants pulled into the excavation with him. It creates an intimacy that demands full presence from everyone in the room.
The first time he stood in front of a live audience of fifty people, strangers and friends side by side, he felt control slip away entirely. And instead of panic, what arrived was clarity. That moment reminded him of exactly what the show is and is not. It is not about being polished. It is about being exposed. It is about what slips out when the narrative we have built around ourselves finally gives way, and the unexpected joy that lives in that space after.
“I didn’t expect people to come away saying they learned something,” he admits. He didn’t engineer that reaction. It arrived on its own. And that, to me, is the most beautiful thing about this work. It gives audiences something they didn’t know they needed, and it does it by simply being completely, uncomfortably, joyfully honest.
Why This, Why Now
There is something almost perfectly timed about DADDY ISSUES arriving in this particular moment.
We live in a world saturated with curated identities and carefully managed narratives. Social media, politics, even casual conversation has become an exercise in presenting the most acceptable, most strategic version of reality. We have become extraordinarily skilled at the performance of ourselves. But the lies we tell the world, visible and discussed as they are, are not the most dangerous ones. The lies we tell ourselves, the ones that quietly shape every decision, every relationship, every story we carry from the moment we wake up each day, those are the ones that go largely unexamined.
DADDY ISSUES is interested in exactly that distinction. Waldner’s definition of identity as the show frames it is quietly radical: sharing your unconscious truth with the world and letting the reaction fall where it may. Simple to say. One of the hardest things a person can actually do. And in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, digital saturation, and the slow erosion of genuine human presence, a show that asks us to be real in a room together feels less like theatre and more like something we genuinely need.
From Hollywood to Edinburgh, One Truth at a Time
DADDY ISSUES lands at Hollywood Fringe this June before moving on to Edinburgh Fringe this August. For Waldner, a writer and performer who moves through the world drawn to anything that makes it feel bigger and stranger, traveling, reading, watching films, chasing experiences that shift his perspective, both feel less like bookings and more like the natural next step for a show this alive.
Fringe audiences have always gravitated toward urgent, necessary work. This show was built, from the very first draft, to be exactly that. And what it offers isn’t polish or spectacle. It is something rarer and more valuable. It is what slips out when you finally stop pretending, and the unexpected joy, strange and clarifying and unmistakably real, that lives on the other side. I believe in this show, in what it gives people, and in Spencer Waldner’s courage to put it on a stage. I cannot wait for you to experience it for yourself.
DADDY ISSUES runs at Upstairs @ El Centro, 1103B North El Centro Ave, Hollywood, CA. Tickets available at hollywoodfringe.org. Performance Dates: Saturday, June 6 at 8:45 PM Friday, June 12 at 5:15 PM Sunday, June 14 at 3:45 PM Saturday, June 20 at 9:00 PM Sunday, June 21 at 5:15 PM Saturday, June 27 at 7:15 PM
About the author
Amina Zamani is a neuroplasticity specialist, executive coach, writer, and global speaker who helps individuals and organizations rewire limiting beliefs, unlock emotional resilience, and step into visionary leadership. Born in Pakistan and raised across cultures, she bridges neuroscience, soul, and systems thinking to catalyze both personal and generational transformation.
Amina has worked with Fortune 500 executives, award-winning creatives, and founders across venture-backed startups. Her upcoming book—rooted in her passion for financial literacy and equity for women—explores the neuroscience and spirituality of money: how early emotional trauma shapes our financial behaviors, beliefs, and capacity to receive. She has been featured on CBS, USA Today, and Lifestyle Magazine, among others. Through her writing, media, and workshops, she champions a future where visibility becomes medicine and belief becomes biology.