Four limp, half-naked bodies lie in a room drenched in blood-red light. Whether they live through the night depends both on your choices and their performance in a series of deadly games.
This isn’t the plot of the new Saw movie but the premise of Zero, an interactive theater experience now running at House of Web3’s crypto clubhouse in the Presidio.
The show, which made its San Francisco debut on Saturday, is the brainchild of Santa Fe-based theater troupe Exodus Ensemble. The game within a play within a crypto coworking space simulates a high-stakes contest run by a rogue artificial intelligence robot. Characters in the show must work with audience members to avoid being permanently deleted.
The experience itself starts with an email.
“Welcome to the arena, the result of a catastrophic event involving four particular life forms,” an ominous narrator says in a video sent to attendees before the show. “You will follow these individuals in order to deduce the ultimate question of the game. Who will get a second chance?”
Longtime theatergoers may roll their eyes, but the dramatic gimmick is part of Exodus Ensemble’s bid to make American theater more like bingeable television shows.
“When we're creating work, we're always drawing from TV. We're like, OK, it's like ‘Squid Game’ meets ‘Yellowjackets’ meets ‘Ex Machina,” said April Cleveland, the troupe’s artistic director of the collective’s work, which updates classic plays into contemporary avant-garde productions set in unconventional spaces.
Cleveland said the group’s mission of making watching theater feel less like eating your vegetables was established during an intense incubatory period as the members developed the company during the pandemic.
For instance, the company infuses heart-racing, cinematic music into its plays’ soundscapes and is not afraid of leaning into graphic depictions of nudity and violence to sex things up.
With Zero, the ensemble—now 3 years old and funded purely on donations—is tackling the tech world, updating Elmer Rice’s 1923 play The Adding Machine, about an accountant replaced by a calculator, with an injection of AI.
As audience members play games to ensure their characters’ survival, the play also follows the story of a genius coder, the play’s titular hero Zero—portrayed by Mikie Beatty—as he attempts to stop his company from rushing the AI technology he created out into the world.
Tony, played alternatingly by actors Patrick Agada and Garrett Young, is Zero’s foil and assumes the swagger of a brash, ego-driven tech CEO who will do almost anything to get a project shipped first.
Zero’s AI creation, Daisy, who runs the game and is played by Tiff Abreu, nails the uncanny valley-like eyelid blinks and facial twitches with lilting Siri-esque pronunciations.
With its residency at the House of Web3, Exodus Ensemble has absorbed some Silicon Valley’s lingo into the show. Think jargon like “decentralized,” “bleeding edge” and the fake math-infused language common on VC Twitter. Members of the group even liken their collective to a “startup” now.
But the play also explores the push-and-pull debate familiar to the tech industry to
either unleash Daisy out into the world unencumbered or cautiously contain her in a proverbial and literal glass box.
“We’ve actually adopted a lot from just having a week with tech people,” Cleveland said. “They believe in [tech] in a way that is as deep and committed as we believe in art. And so that's been really cool to see and to add that kind of commitment to what the characters are fighting for.”
Case-in-point: how Beatty approaches Zero. Although the character was partially inspired by Colin Farrell’s simple-minded earnestness in The Banshees of Inisherin, Beatty found himself modeling his performance on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s soft-spoken demeanor even as he helms the creation of a potentially apocalyptic technology.
“My Zero sort of explores what it would look like if that loving and benevolent approach to building humanity-altering technology was stretched all the way through to a fault,” Beatty said.
Who decides the future of AI is yet to be decided, but at least in Zero, the audience have a say in the ultimate direction.
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The Exodus Ensemble’s "Zero" plays through Oct. 9. The group also presents its version of Anton Chekhov’s "Ivanov" on Oct. 6. Registration is free, but donations are encouraged. Visit exodusensemble.com/sanfrancisco for ticketing info and details.