Citizen Chen and FREE KITTENS make comedy personal at Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival
Sharply funny shows by standup comics Scarlet Chen and Megan Milton get theatrical about themes of immigration and mother-daughter relationships
FREE KITTENS at rEvolver Festival.
Upintheair Theatre presents rEvolver Festival at The Cultch from May 22 to 31
STANDUP COMEDY MIGHT not be the first form you think of when it comes to emotional, deeply personal storytelling—novels, poetry, song, and film come to mind first. But for Scarlet Chen and Megan Milton, it’s the stories that give standup its bite.
Chen and Milton are the respective creators of Citizen Chen and FREE KITTENS, two of rEvolver Festival’s 2026 mainstage shows. The festival, which runs at The Cultch’s Historic Theatre from May 22 to 31, is Upintheair Theatre’s annual slate of independent local programming. This year, rEvolver’s executive team wrote that they mean to emphasize “projects rooted in communities that experience marginalization….paying close attention to whose voices are often unheard.”
Upintheair Theatre began as a collaboration between local directors David Mott and Daniel Martin. The two founded the company in 1999, following a successful run at the Vancouver Fringe. In 2013, Upintheair launched rEvolver Festival to feature emerging artists in the local theatre scene.
Chen first heard of rEvolver when she was acting in Percolate, a family dramedy set in an operating coffee shop, at the Nanaimo Fringe. The festival producer invited Chen to perform a standup set on the Fringe’s outdoor stage. She decided to push herself and perform the first draft of a longer set she was working on, a set that would go on to become Citizen Chen. Percolate’s director, Tamara McCarthy, saw Chen’s performance and advised her to put it in the running for rEvolver festival.
Citizen Chen is rooted in its creator’s experience as a first-generation immigrant in Canada. In an in-person interview with Stir, she says the show is about “immigration, belonging, identity, and the weird things that we do to fit in.”
Chen moved to Gabriola Island from Beijing in 2020, right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, she’d had a successful career in film, working on several high-profile U.S.-Chinese productions, such as Kill Bill and Iron Man 3, and she was planning to return after pandemic restrictions eased off.
“I was still thinking that, after COVID, I would go back to China, continue my film work,” she says. “But then I just fell in love with the place. I discovered a comedy-writing workshop on Gabriola—I thought it was for writing a novel or screenwriting….It turned out to be for standup comedy.”
Chen always thought standup was about quick wit and charm—something she could handle just fine in Mandarin. At the time, though, her English was functional but imperfect. When her workshop leader asked her to perform in a show he was putting on, she had reservations. When she actually got to work, though, she realized standup is really all about writing and delivery—once you have the material, there really isn’t much quick thinking to be done onstage. Her first show went off without a hitch, and the audience loved her. She was hooked.
“I kind of accidentally found a path that I’m good at,” she says, “and I also discovered that I don’t have stage fright!”
Chen pursued standup for the next few years, performing at open mikes and paid gigs to try out new material, until she wound up at the Nanaimo Fringe and, eventually, rEvolver. Citizen Chen is the culmination of all that.
“It forms the full arc of my journey of immigration from visitor to citizen,” she says. “I hope, after the show, people feel seen and heard.”
Scarlet Chen
Megan Milton’s FREE KITTENS has had a similarly long journey to rEvolver. The show started as a pitch to the Winnipeg Comedy Festival in 2021—that year’s prompt to prospective comedians was a request for their most controversial take. Milton had hers locked and loaded.
“My hottest take was that I think my mom should have had an abortion,” she tells Stir in a Zoom interview. “I’ve had a lot of material over the years about my relationship with my mom—I’m an autobiographical writer, so I get my material from what I’ve lived through. I wrote ten minutes basically talking about my mom being a teenage mother.”
Milton didn’t get into the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, but she did end up submitting a similar idea to the Vancouver Fringe later that year. Her piece was selected. She was a standup comic without much experience in the nitty-gritty of theatre production, so she brought on fellow comedian Danielle Florence as her director. By opening night, they had a solid 30-minute version of Milton’s original idea.
After that, Milton thought FREE KITTENS was final. It was about her mother, and her mother would never change. But then she did.
“My mother went into a treatment facility, got therapy, and then proceeded to completely change. She had, like, full-on ego death or something,” Milton says with a laugh. “I don’t know what happened in there, but she came out a wildly different person. And I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’m rewriting the show.’”
FREE KITTENS is still about abortion, bodily autonomy, and failed parenting. But now it’s also about redemption, healing, and the possibility, however remote, that people can evolve. It’s a theme Milton never would have imagined showing up in her work, but as she rebuilt her relationship with her mother, it felt inevitable that the show would have to be altered—even if her mother would never see it.
“We have this agreement not to talk about it,” says Milton. “She’s accepted that I process my trauma through art and that she kind of doesn’t have a leg to stand on with that particular issue.” Even so, Milton thinks she’d be all right with her mother seeing this new version of the show.
Milton has had to incorporate other changes over the years. Last June, she developed myalgic encephalitis—chronic fatigue syndrome. With a show at the Fringe coming up in September, she and Florence had to adapt FREE KITTENS so that she could be seated throughout. This worked, but Milton felt they hadn’t had the time to fully workshop the new blocking and positioning.
Now, at rEvolver, she feels they have it down. While Chen hopes her show will make people feel seen just the way they are, Milton is a little more confrontational.
“I hesitate to encourage a lot of people who are pro-life to show up, because I feel like they’re very rarely not a problem,” she jokes. “But I kind of hope a few people come in and have their minds changed. A big part of the show and what I was trying to accomplish with it is really getting people to ask themselves why they believe what they believe.” 
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