1. The Builders Association

The Builders Association was founded in 1994 in an empty industrial space on Manhattan’s West Side. Directed by Marianne Weems, the company creates original productions that examine the impact of media on various cultures and communities. The Builders’ work has appeared at over 85 venues across the globe including the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, the Romaeuropa Festival, the Seoul International Festival, and many more. In New York, we have been presented at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, BAM (six New York premieres), Lincoln Center, St. Ann’s Warehouse, The Kitchen, New York Theatre Workshop, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, among others. We have developed 20 original works from large-scale installations to intimate character-driven performances; from live performance to online streaming to live/streaming hybrid events. Our work has addressed issues such as outsourcing and corporate colonialism in Bangalore, India (ALLADEEN, 2003–2005), dataveillance (SUPER VISION, 2005–2006), and the global financial crisis developed with victims of home foreclosure (HOUSE/DIVIDED, 2011–2014). The Builders’ artistic vision is to provide a cultural context in which to process what it means to live with technology. Creatively, the Builders are a company made for this time, when performance and technology have never been so interdependent. Our work is not just “multimedia,” but a deeper interrogation of media’s incursions into our daily lives and the invisible networks that drive capital and culture.

Figure 2.

From left: LaToya Lewis, Matthew Karges, and Moe Angelos in HOUSE/DIVIDED at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2010. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs and Moe Angelos. (Photo by James Gibbs)

Staff

Marianne Weems, Artistic Director

Shannon Sindelar, Producing Director

Morgan Lindsey Tachco, Development Consultant

Board

Kim Whitener, President

James Gibbs, Secretary

Erica Laird, Treasurer

Sharon Connelly, David Pence, Jennifer Tipton, and Marianne Weems, Members

Moe Angelos and Dan Dobson, Advisory Members

Program Note

The Builders Association creates projects that address cultural, economic, and technological flash points. Several of our productions have been circling around the long influence of Ayn Rand on American policy, and her proximity to power in the US government.

ATLAS DRUGGED picks up this thread and suggests where it may lead us in the near future, now that Ayn Rand’s descendants have become the power brokers of a new Silicon Valley, venture capital–backed elite. We posit that this group, having already captured the culture (social media and search engines) and the economy, will go after the government next; the government being, of course, not only the creator of pesky regulations, but also a source of perennial frustration for a group that sees itself as smarter and better than the rest of us.

As it turns out, the idea that Engineers know better than everyone else and should properly be put in charge of everything is older even than Ayn Rand, and had its first flowering in the early 20th-century “Technocracy” movement. In one of history’s neat rhymes, Elon Musk’s grandfather was convicted for his involvement in “Technocracy Incorporated,” a Canadian organization that advocated for a totalitarian regime in North America ruled by Engineers and Scientists. Ayn Rand’s vision of “Galt’s Gulch” from the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is a fictional microcosm of the same idea: a utopia created by and for the very “best” men: producers and innovators, looking out for their own self-interest and engineering their way to greatness, unencumbered by regulations or by the demands of “moochers,” her catchall term for those who require, well, pretty much anything at all.

Ayn Rand dreamed of steamships and skyscrapers: the ultimate symbols of industrialism. In our own moment, of course, the latest flowering of Engineering is AI, and we stand by as witnesses watching it change every aspect of our world while the government struggles to keep up. Another instance of “move fast and break things.” In just the last two months, current events have caught up to some of our “five minutes into the future” predictions. J.D. Vance, whose Senate seat was purchased by Ayn Rand acolyte and West Coast venture capitalist Peter Thiel, has been selected as a vice-presidential candidate, a man potentially a heartbeat away from the highest power in America.Footnote ¹ And until quite recently J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel made no secret of their fascination with Curtis Yarvin, a neoreactionary “philosopher” whose racist fantasies run to the total destruction of the US government and a new golden age of totalitarian mini states ruled by Engineers and other deserving men: Galt’s Gulches, each and every one of them.

Figure 3.

“Town Hall.” Video deepfake of Elon Musk created by media designers Austin Switser and David Pym in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. From left: Moe Angelos, Erin Gray, Larry Shea, and Tanya Selvaratnam. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Greg Kessler)

So we invite you to witness the construction of a candidate, play a game, and let your investments dictate the end of our show. After all, your choices do make a difference.

—James Gibbs, writer/dramaturg

Presenting ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts the week before the 2024 US presidential election was a deliberate and urgent act of cultural engagement. In a moment of heightened political polarization and existential questions about democracy, the Builders Association’s reimagining of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—a foundational text for American libertarianism—offered a pointed critique of individualism, corporate power, and the myth of self-made success. By staging this visually inventive and intellectually incisive work just days before voters went to the polls, Skirball positioned the theatre as a space for reflection, confrontation, and civic dialogue. ATLAS DRUGGED invited audiences to question not only the narratives that shape our economic ideologies but also the stories we choose to elevate in moments of national decision-making. It was a performance that didn’t just mirror the times—it demanded we reckon with them.

—Jay Wegman, Executive Director, NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (2025)

3. Interview with Richard Schechner and The Builders Association

Richard Schechner’s conversation with Marianne Weems (director), Moe Angelos (performer), and James Gibbs (writer/dramaturg) took place on 28 January 2025 on Zoom, after the run of ATLAS DRUGGED in New York.

Figure 4.

Rehearsal photo of “The Lab” in ATLAS DRUGGED. Video design by Austin Switser. Performer: Moe Angelos. Target Margin, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Marianne Weems)

RICHARD SCHECHNER: Let’s start with how you titled the performance. Online I found “Atlas Drugged,” a 2010 song by the punk group Look What I Did. I also found a 2013 episode of Mr. and Mrs. Murder on Amazon Prime called “Atlas Drugged.” And I found Stephen Goldstein’s 2012 novel, Atlas Drugged: Ayn Rand Be Damned! What about these?

MARIANNE WEEMS: Moe [Angelos] knew about the punk song. I knew something of the book, which was self-published. Rand’s addiction to Benzedrine was also at play in our title. Basically, the way we title a lot of our shows is we get deep into the material, and then we have a free-form session where people just yell out titles. Usually, Moe wins. Moe has named many of our shows.

SCHECHNER: So you had your title before you became aware of these other things?

WEEMS: Exactly. We had already gone down the road, and so I decided not to change.

SCHECHNER: Moe, did you listen to the punk song?

MOE ANGELOS: I did. It’s more towards the drugged end of ATLAS DRUGGED. I liked that. I like that they went for it in a way that’s not our métier. We don’t do it that boldly.

SCHECHNER: Okay, let’s go beyond the title. ATLAS DRUGGED is about the US 2028 election, but it’s also about the 2024 election. You made the show before the ’24 election. At the very end, the Ayn Rand–type candidate says “I will not rest until America is great again.” So obviously, even though it’s ostensibly about 2028, it’s patently about Donald J. Trump in 2024. Thinking of ATLAS DRUGGED today, 28 January 2025, just eight days into Trump’s presidency, after he’s flooded the country with executive orders, two things come to mind. First, trans people are no longer welcome, they are being purged, persecuted. Trump has ordered that there are only two genders. And, second, the raids seizing immigrants have started. More bad stuff is on the way. What is the role of theater, of The Builders Association, in the time of Trump? I’m asking because you put it out there in ATLAS DRUGGED.

WEEMS: Our work is very process-based. We started talking about ATLAS DRUGGED three years ago, maybe more. The idea of aligning it exactly with the election came a little later. It wasn’t like we started out saying, “Damn, we’re going to launch this thing in October of 2024.” But even in 2021, it was clear we wanted to talk about creating a post-truth candidate and also explore being an audience member in these very uncertain times. The idea of having the audience help tune the candidate emerged early on. I found some of my notes, like: “Possible Futures. Zuckerberg merges SSA [Social Security Agency] with social media. Google, Facebook, and Apple are Techno Nation States.” Those were really pie in the sky, crazy ideas that we were going to unfold. They are frighteningly real right now.

SCHECHNER: In the show, California secedes, which doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

JAMES GIBBS: One thing that was happening during working on this show was the increasing awareness of the curdling of tech optimism. There was a moment around the Arab SpringFootnote ² when people still believed in a Stewart BrandFootnote ³ future, where tech was going to usher in this brighter age of democracy, and a tool like Twitter was helping to bring democracy to the world. That was not that long ago. That’s part of the journey of the show—us making the show while living through this turning, this curdling of optimism around tech and democracy and politics. And so it’s been a whirlwind, basically, from the couple of months leading up to opening ATLAS DRUGGED till Trump’s inauguration and the last eight days. But I think that we were right on the pulse of figuring out what was happening with people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. But speaking for myself, I’m still stunned by how quickly they took the last mile to actually have those people—Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, Musk—seated right up front in the inauguration as a single bunch. The new oligarchy. But don’t mistake it for just being about money. It’s about attention. So obviously, Zuckerberg and Musk are in control of attention, and to a lesser extent Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, Amazon, and Twitch. Essentially, this new group is not just the money oligarchy—they’re the attention oligarchy that just got married to the government in this dark way. I think we were seeing that on the horizon right as it was happening. It was exciting to work on the process and see that. Terrifying, of course, as well.

Figure 5.

Moe Angelos in a workshop of ATLAS DRUGGED at Theater Mitu, 2023. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Marianne Weems)

ANGELOS: Oh, yeah, I agree with what James and Marianne have said. I’m also shocked at how our imagined future, which we thought was like, “Oh, this is too absurd to happen,” is now unfolding in a real way. But the audience at Skirball [NYU] thought the show was very funny. Is it still funny? I don’t know. I don’t know if that strategy of undercutting power with humor will work these days.

VIDEO 1:

Power Play https://vimeo.com/1089375679

SCHECHNER: You have the audience voting for one of these funds.Footnote ⁴ I was there only one night. Did the vote come out the same every time?

GIBBS: Throughout the show, the spectators can win money in a trivia game about power. Using their cellphones, they can invest their money in either of two funds. One is for progressive projects and one is for an amoral tech fund. At the end of the performance, they can sweep all of their money, which has been earning throughout, into one or the other fund. Whichever fund the majority of the audience sweeps their money into wins the election. This vote shows democracy crashing into capitalism. It’s not just a simple vote for what you want. It’s mixed in with this idea of money, investment, and the mania for tech that now invests in—infects—everyone’s 401(k) as well as their life on their phones. That’s the set up. The first night of the three performances, the tech fund won.

SCHECHNER: At NYU.

GIBBS: At NYU. So we did the dark Curtis Yarvin ending. ^{Footnote 5} But we couldn’t stand the darkness, so we did a “recount.” We were surprised at the vote, but we couldn’t leave it at that and not have Glinda from Oz come out and lift our spirits.Footnote ⁶ On the other two nights, the good ending won. I think it’s important to say that the voting is real. It wasn’t just a trick on the stage. We were accurately tallying the votes and presenting the ending. The “recount” is a funny fake that refers to distrust about democracy in America after Trump’s refusing to concede the 2020 election.

SCHECHNER: Why didn’t you trust the audience the night I was there? Bad ending and all? Why rig the election with a phony recount? If I were directing the piece, I would say, well, too bad, that’s the way it is. If you give the power to the audience, give it to them however it turns out.

Figure 6.

Logo designed by Larry Shea for the Power Play game show in ATLAS DRUGGED, created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. Premiered at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. (Photo by Larry Shea)

GIBBS: One thing is the timing. We were just days before this election, and to go out and beat people up in their fragile state seemed really difficult. The other thing, I suspect one of the reasons people chose evil the first night and good the other two nights, were the stakes, what the audience’s choice was going to do for the show if we didn’t do a “recount”—didn’t put our thumb on the scale. Do we let people remain motivated by their greed as they watch those numbers go up? Or do we remind them five times that what their selection is going to do is choose the candidate? In the end, on those days, 70 hours away from the election, we didn’t want to just beat people up with a bad ending. But I think there’s a more subtle question. If you run the show again and let people choose, you still have to decide how you guide the language that sets up the vote, how much influence you have.

SCHECHNER: Why Ayn Rand? There are a lot of capitalists out there. Why this one?

WEEMS: It started in HOUSE/DIVIDED (2011 to 2014).

SCHECHNER: I don’t remember her being in that.

WEEMS: No, she’s not in it explicitly but her acolyte—

GIBBS: —Alan Greenspan.Footnote ⁷

SCHECHNER: Greenspan, right. But HOUSE/DIVIDED is about the 2008 financial crisis brought on by the housing bubble bursting, subprime mortgages going south, that stuff.

GIBBS: Greenspan was part of the weird uptown “think tank” that Ayn Rand was running. His role in the 2008 crisis, which was essentially to argue for letting the markets do whatever they would with very little oversight, was her philosophy at work in one of her protégés. We jokingly were like, “Okay, well, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, they’ve got to be in all our shows from here on out.” Somebody else take me through the next couple of years until we get closer to ATLAS DRUGGED.

WEEMS: Rand surfaced in ELEMENTS OF OZ when we were trying to figure out what to do with the Wicked Witch. Moe, you uncovered her interview with Mike Wallace,Footnote ⁸ her most famous public appearance. Wallace did this very extensive pseudo-intellectual interview with her.

SCHECHNER: Oh, really?

WEEMS: Yeah. When she’s at her most Benzedrine-driven… Moe, do you want to do a little impersonation?

GIBBS: Before that, let me just say one thing. ELEMENTS OF OZ, part of the pun of that title is silver and gold are elements. There’s this insane idea that the original Frank Baum version of the Oz story is about the gold standard,Footnote ⁹ about the country going off the gold standard, and that it’s a parable of the progressive movement of the late 19th century. And the yellow brick road represents the gold standard, the cowardly lion is William Jennings Bryan, etc. So it’s one of many crazy stories about Oz that we were playing with in ELEMENTS OF OZ. And one connection with Ayn Rand is that her bottom line for capitalism is against fiat currency and for the gold standard.Footnote ¹⁰ To rely on the gold standard is true unfettered capitalism with no government interference. So that’s a connection there, and it’s also a connection to Greenspan, because obviously his role at the Fed was exactly to manipulate the currency.

Figure 7.

“The ‘good’ ending.” Video deepfake created by media designers Austin Switser and David Pym. Performer: Moe Angelos. ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Marianne Weems)

Figure 8.

From left: Jess Barbagallo, Phil Garrett, LaToya Lewis, Moe Angelos, and Sean Donovan as Alan Greenspan in HOUSE/DIVIDED at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2010. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs and Moe Angelos. (Photo by James Gibbs)

WEEMS: Yeah, right. Thank you. I forgot about all that. Okay, so Rand surfaced as the Wicked Witch and we did portions of the Mike Wallace interview. Essentially, she was espousing the same philosophy, the virtue of selfishness, the morality of capitalism, private roads, private hospitals, private schools, valorizing winners as heroes. It’s all in that Wallace interview. But then, Moe, you really got interested in the biographical part of her story, right?

ANGELOS: Yes, because in that Mike Wallace interview, it’s very early, right, 1959? It’s black and white, it was CBS, I think. But people, and she, did not know how to be telegenic in those days. They didn’t understand how the camera worked and that they had to essentially always be conscious of the camera and how you look. In the interview, you see Rand backed up in her chair like this, and her eyes are darting back and forth like this. She’s a cornered animal, and she’s smoking—many things that no longer happen in that kind of media. But I was watching her and I thought, oh, yeah, that back-and-forth motion of the eyes is a response to trauma. Then I went down the rabbit hole of her personal life. It’s a long story, but she was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia, as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a Jew.

SCHECHNER: Oh, really? I didn’t know. Interesting.

ANGELOS: She was special because at that time in Russia, Jews were not allowed to live in St. Petersburg. They had to live in the Pale of Settlement. ^{Footnote 11} But her family was special. Her father was a pharmacist. He was very prosperous; he earned his status in society. But then in 1917 the Bolsheviks came in and everything was taken from them. James and I posited that this trauma set everything in motion beyond that. It’s all a response to that incident that changed her life. They took everything from her and her family. Still, she graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924 and enrolled in the State School for Cinema to study screenwriting. She emigrated to America in 1926. She worked in Hollywood, wanted to be a film director, blah, blah, blah, a whole lot of backstory there. But the “moochers,” the people who did not deserve it, just came in and stole everything from the people who worked hard and deserved what they got. We made a little show about that; we didn’t finish it. We moved on. Then Rand appeared again in ATLAS DRUGGED with this idea that “the marketplace will solve all of our problems” in the same way that the Silicon Valley bros think that “the internet is going to solve all our problems. Tech is going to solve all our problems.”

GIBBS: Peter Thiel is a big follower of Ayn Rand. Elon Musk seems to think he’s living in an Ayn Rand novel. Rand’s objectivism is a perennial undercurrent of the American right. It never quite goes away. It bubbles up from time to time. I don’t think that’s something we’re making up. Those tech bros are steeped in this culture, and Ayn Rand’s a big part of that culture. Thiel is the one who paid for J.D. Vance and put him in his Senate seat. Throughout Rand’s work she valorizes heroes who make things happen, who perform power. In Atlas Shrugged there’s this Galt’s Gulch thing where the real makers, the people leading the railroads, they basically go on strike. They take their dolls and dishes and go home, and the country turns into a battleground, a disaster. It’s this valorization of the winners that’s really a part of Rand’s philosophy, the cruelty of her philosophy. There’s the idea that if you have money, you are by definition good. That’s where we are. That’s what’s happening. Those people are in Washington now.

SCHECHNER: Rand may be Jewish, but her “philosophy” is deja vu Protestant ethic. Being one of God’s elect and acquiring wealth are equivalent. Rand haunts your entire production, but you never quote her directly, do you?

WEEMS: Not directly…

SCHECHNER: It’s not like she didn’t have anything to say. She wrote books. There’s that Wallace interview. She haunts ATLAS DRUGGED but how come she never got into the performance itself?

GIBBS: There’s lots of language in the show that’s a remix of things she said, mostly when the AI is channeling Ayn Rand, when Moe is channeling Ayn Rand through the injection of the AI she spouts these Randian things, very close to Rand’s speeches and writings. And—this is a bigger thing that maybe we’ll talk about later—inside the show, language that purports to be generated by AI is really cowritten by AIs. We used AI not to write the whole show, but to write the parts that are supposedly written by AIs. What Moe says when she channels Ayn Rand is us asking AI to write a speech in the style of Ayn Rand.

SCHECHNER: There are really two major narratives. The Power Play, the game, and what’s happening to the test subject, to Moe. How did you come upon these? How did you decide to put them together? And also why the hilarious beginning? Builders is high tech, but Moe wears this metal Buck Rogers thing on her head, right out of kindergarten. It certainly isn’t how scientists actually put electrodes on the brain.

WEEMS: You mean the colander?

SCHECHNER: Was that what it was?

WEEMS: You think that’s low tech?

SCHECHNER: The colander reminds me of early Star Trek.

WEEMS: Yeah, right. Scenographically, at the beginning, when the large language model is introducing Ayn Rand, it’s meant to be this primitive analog—

SCHECHNER: The brain is analog?

WEEMS: Yeah. But as Moe becomes more inflected by the AI, by the Ayn Rand AI, they talk about her as a compound entity between the test subject and Anthem AI. Her head doesn’t stay in the colander. In the next scene, she’s wearing a neural net. Finally, it graduates to a deepfake mask and she doesn’t need anything. There’s still a little hint of it: she’s wearing a halo. But the idea is that the deepfakes take over in terms of the AI.

VIDEO 2:

The Lab: AI Training https://vimeo.com/1089375569

SCHECHNER: You move from the analog to the digital visually? And, Moe, you also give your own biography as the test subject. You talk about being in Tisch’s Experimental Theatre Wing (ETW), your actual biography. How often has Builders done that before? I don’t remember ever. What’s going on there?

ANGELOS: I’m going to defer to James on that.

GIBBS: Let me say something about both of those things. First, the colander. Even though the Builders is known for high tech, the truth behind that is that we’re always stretching every penny. We have to make no money look high tech. It’s not like IBM is funding these shows.

SCHECHNER: You didn’t call Peter Thiel?

GIBBS: He didn’t answer our calls! So even though it’s high tech, multimedia, mediaturgy, there’s an element of, “Let’s put on a show in the barn.” We love theater and that ethos.

SCHECHNER: But you’re also making fun of the very thing you’re doing. Putting a colander on your head is making theater in a barn but it’s also a way of gaining control over it, your process, by turning it into a kids’ game.

GIBBS: It’s a way of bringing the audience on our side at the top of the show. I would say the same thing about our joking about nonprofit theater and ETW. Especially because ATLAS DRUGGED premiered at Skirball, at NYU, at home. It’s an affectionate jokiness around what we’re doing, which is still theater. It’s playful and it’s us.

SCHECHNER: But you also are consciously retro. Like Wheel of Fortune or high-brow Jeopardy, whatever. There are dozens of shows like that and they’re all retro. They are not digital. Why did you follow suit? Why not invent an AI game instead?

WEEMS: It was meant to feel very analog and familiar and cozy in that game show way. Originally, my thought was that this was a way to underscore the whole world of alternative facts and what is real. I wanted the game to be called Truth or Troll. Then we finally edged towards propaganda as the main thing, but still the idea was “What’s real?” This continues to surface through the course of the show as we’re playing against deep fakes and AI and all of these more sophisticated ways to reconstruct reality. That simplistic game was counterpoint to that.

GIBBS: The game did involve people using their phones and us getting data in realtime. There’s an element of it that’s not just a Wheel of Fortune.

SCHECHNER: Of course, there’s a tension between the two. Let’s move on. Is this the first show you’ve done since Covid?

WEEMS: Yes.

SCHECHNER: How would you describe the evolution of your work from the publication of your and Shannon Jackson’s book in 2015?

WEEMS: Well, it’s a lifelong project. We’re constantly reaching back and pulling the tentacles of ideas into the next show. Some of it is like, “Oh, yeah, we should do that next time.” Occasionally, I write something down that’s a seed for the next show. Usually not. But the process is continuous, and it was weirdly continuous through the pandemic. I’m going to just go out on a limb here and say, in many ways, it was easier to work because everybody was available. In the early days we just met online for ages, and it was easy to say “let’s meet in a couple of days” because no one had anything else on their calendar. So there was a different sense of investing time in the shows. We did a Decameron project that was Moe’s idea, although I think everybody did a Decameron during the pandemic. And then we worked on I AGREE TO THE TERMS, and that brought us back to live theater. It went from being a completely online performance to, in its final version, live at Theater Mitu in Brooklyn, performed in person but streamed online to the audience.

We returned to working at our scale in live theater, which is an ambitious scale and always has been. But by now we’re doing it with about an eighth of the money, and a third of the time—we made that show in about four weeks. It’s a lot, I mean, I’m surrounded by experts and everybody knows exactly what they’re doing, and that’s why it did come together. But it was a heavy lift.

SCHECHNER: How is ATLAS DRUGGED in continuity with your earlier work? Did the Covid time result in a fundamental change in what Builders does? It does not seem so to me.

WEEMS: The way that ATLAS DRUGGED is in conversation with technology is through the deepfakes and the AI. The container, the strategies of how we choreograph attention, is similar to past projects. It’s all about screens and cameras and projections. But the way that we’re manipulating Moe’s image was new, and it was a ton of work. The two media designers, Austin Switser and David Pym, figured out how to create “deepfakes” live, in real time, which was relatively cutting edge. So they could switch from Moe’s face to Taylor Swift to Dolly Parton to Mr. Rogers and back to Ayn Rand in time with the “candidate.” Our sound designer Dan Dobson also trained an AI on these voices: Ayn Rand, Mr. Rogers, etc., so that Moe’s voice could be heard, but processed through these filters. I think we could do a whole other show that’s just Moe’s face and voice with these digital masks.

VIDEO 3:

Focus Group https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1089375702

SCHECHNER: In your earlier shows, you use media to explore things—call centers in ALLADEEN, perpetual travel in JET LAG, the mortgage collapse in HOUSE/DIVIDED, a classic American myth in ELEMENTS OF OZ, whatever it is, you use technology to enhance the performance, to drive the narrative. The technology is enabling, it’s fun. But in ATLAS DRUGGED, you ask a huge question many are asking: Are we going to use AI or is it going to use us? Is AI Plato coming true? The ideal digital form that exists beyond experience creates the shadows where we live. AI as the perfection of thought in and of itself. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Figure 9.

“The Lab.” Moe Angelos in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Greg Kessler)

WEEMS: Oh yes, I do. Yes, we do.

ANGELOS: But is perfectionism that interesting? That’s the thing.

SCHECHNER: What Plato said, basically, is that everything we have, this pencil, the room, even us-as-beings, are representations or imitations of representations of an ideal that exists in a virtual world. Now AI can make the ideal pencil and then generate its own pencil representations to populate the world. Is this what ATLAS DRUGGED is proposing?

WEEMS: I will stake our claim that we, the Builders, have always used technology to talk about technology. It’s never just been this seamless glorification of the tools. The last thing to go will be our way to speak and think critically about AI. Sure, maybe AI could make a Builders show, but I’m not sure it will be able to point to the disruptions and seams and the brokenness that will still be in there somewhere. I’m not sure that the critical factor will be as easily replicated.

SCHECHNER: No, it won’t be. The question is whether it will allow you to exercise those functions.

GIBBS: One thing threading through these performances… I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand a couple of times and Marianne mentioned him. There’s the techno-optimism or utopianism that came out of California in the late ’60s, and now we’re finally seeing the destruction of that as an ethos by its fruit, you could say. Like, know the tree by its fruit. Look around. This is where that got us. In ATLAS DRUGGED and in I AGREE TO THE TERMS, we explore the idea of technological solutions to social and political problems, which is, to our mind, absurd. That’s why we keep criticizing it. And I think the question you’re asking, a thread inside the question, is that the solutions to these things are not going to come from technology. If they’re solved, they’re going to come from society. Trying to understand how to put guardrails on AI or use it, legislate around it, agree around it. There are two different conversations. One is where can the technology go and where will it go? The other, which is more unpredictable, is what are we going to do about it?

Figure 10.

“The Lab” in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. From left: Moe Angelos, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jasmine Richards, Will Rinkoff, Erin Gray, and Larry Shea. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Greg Kessler)

SCHECHNER: If AI becomes able to think and reproduce itself, it will also be a player. That’s the point. It will have agency. Right now, it’s a tool. You can ask it to do something, but it’s not asking you to do something—not yet. The singularity possibility is that at a certain point, AI will be its own thing. It will inquire and project without any input from us. That goes far beyond your work in a certain way, but I think it’s implicit in your work.

GIBBS: Yeah. I think that there’s a philosophical question about whether something that appears to be the thing is the thing. With AI, we’ll reach a point where it appears to be conscious and appears to be able to come up with ideas or whatever we want to call it. Can it pass the Turing Test?Footnote ¹² But if you look under the hood at how it operates, does it actually have consciousness and agency? This goes beyond the scope of the things we’re investigating, which have more to do with the tools and critiquing the tools and what our social response to those tools might be.

SCHECHNER: Okay, I’m going to leave it there. I want to ask one question more. All these years later, does the work you did with Ron Vawter and The Wooster Group still impact your current work?Footnote ¹³ It happened in a formative time of your lives.

WEEMS: I had a glorious seven-year run at The Performing Garage as dramaturg and assistant director. I worked on all the shows and videos that were made in that period, beginning with Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony and ending with Fish Story so, roughly, 1988 to ’93. When Ron Vawter decided to make Roy Cohn/Jack Smith in 1992 he was dealing with AIDS-related complications and he invited me to work on it with him. Embracing that material was like feeling the real world burst into that highly aestheticized space. Ron’s very abrupt turn into actual politics definitely informed what happened to me next. The Builders’ work is still driven by content, real-world content. Moe, what do you think?

ANGELOS: Wow. When I start to think about all those roots and the mycelium connections of the past, all five of us here in this Zoom room are connected through that work. The first piece of experimental theater that I saw live in New York was your [Schechner’s 1979] production of Genet’s The Balcony.

SCHECHNER: Ron in drag as Madam Irma and Steve Borst as the Police Chief. The production also featured Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe, too.

ANGELOS: Just the other night here at the Santa Fe Art Institute I was talking about the Cockettes documentary, and so they were like, “What’s that?” And so I showed it.Footnote ¹⁴ Martin Worman is in there.Footnote ¹⁵ Hibiscus too, who as an 18-year-old very famously put carnations in the rifle barrels that National Guard soldiers pointed at the students protesting on the National Mall in Washington.Footnote ¹⁶ So that’s a long arc, a very long arc. I just am so grateful—this is a personal note—so grateful that at NYU I transferred out of the Stella Adler Conservatory and into ETW [Experimental Theatre Wing].

SCHECHNER: We all are.

GIBBS: Most definitely.

WEEMS: Yes, we all are.

4. Script Excerpts from ATLAS DRUGGED by James Gibbs

LAB #1

ENGINEER: Atlas Log, April 2nd, 2028. Election day minus 219 days.

Our test subject arrives. Her suitability for the project is apparent: She was trained in acting and performance in the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU. This, in combination with her longstanding history of underemployment and nonprofit wages, has resulted in a particularly tractable—not to say desperate—nature. Relevant data: Notices for her performances, while sporadic, are overall positive. Appears highly personable.

Our goal: To create the ultimate Presidential Candidate by integrating the subject with our AI model of author-philosopher Ayn Rand, who advocated for rational and ethical egoism. I want to thank the board for their trust in me and for funding this highly significant work. You will not be disappointed. Testing begins.

(Lights up on the Lab.)

LEE: I thought we would be in Mountain View, or Fremont maybe?

ENGINEER: We’re an independent foundation.

LEE: (Looking around) So this is it?

ENGINEER: We’re not officially connected to the other business interests of our board members.

LEE: Uh huh.

ENGINEER: So… welcome! And thanks for joining the Technocracy team.

LEE: It sounded fun. Well, different.

ENGINEER: It certainly is. Technocracy is a chance to really change our system for the better.

LEE: Technocracy…

ENGINEER: Technocracy 2.0: Technological Solutions to Social and Political Problems.

LEE: And the pay’s not bad either.

ENGINEER: We’re not actually supposed to discuss our pay. It’s in the NDA.

LEE: Well, I’m just an actor, but I’ve always heard those things are unenforceable—

ENGINEER: (Interrupting LEE while setting up the camera with ASSISTANT)—let’s get started. I need you to look into the camera.

I’m supposed to let you know that there’s no need to be nervous at all.

LEE: Should I be nervous? They said it was s—

ENGINEER: —safe. That’s right. Perfectly safe.

(ASSISTANT puts large helmet on LEE’s head and hooks it up to old-fashioned video equipment, plugging in leads.)

LEE: I thought this was going to be high tech? What’s with the old stuff?

ENGINEER: I assure you, the language model is cutting edge. Our team has been tuning it on Ayn Rand’s work for over six months.

LEE: (With slight tone of disgust) Ayn Rand…

ENGINEER: Fortunately she had tremendous output, including her 1,192-page novel Atlas Shrugged.

LEE: Uh huh. I started that…

ENGINEER: She sold over 37 million copies of her novels.

Take these tablets. Those should help you with the nausea.

LEE: Nobody said anything about nausea.

ENGINEER: Previous subjects have reported feelings of (air quotes) “Linguistic seasickness.” Being disoriented within the words—

LEE: —What does that mean?

ENGINEER: I think it’s a mind/body thing. One subject said it was—(consults notes on phone)—“the thoughts coming up like sick.” A kind of “word bile” in the throat.

LEE: (Worried) Bile…

ENGINEER: And headaches. It’s nothing to worry about. This is important work you’re going to be doing. Ready?

LEE: I guess.

ENGINEER: I need your verbal consent.

LEE: Okay.

ENGINEER: (Pointing to the camera) I need you to say “yes.”

LEE: Okay, yes.

ENGINEER: Thank you.

(Snaps fingers in front of LEE’s face, assumes more brisk demeanor.) This is baseline test one. Please follow my finger. (Moves finger back-and-forth across LEE’s face.) Just follow my finger with your eyes. Are you with me?

LEE: Yeah… Yes!

ENGINEER: Good. Now. Please name any five concrete inanimate objects in the same category.

LEE: In the same…category?

ENGINEER: Yes. Any five objects in the same category.

LEE: Toaster… Blender… Waffle Iron?… Icemaker… Stand mixer.

ENGINEER: Very good.

(ENGINEER looks to tech team for thumbs up, then, addressing them.) Okay. Baseline One complete.

(To LEE) Ready?

LEE: What do I do?

ENGINEER: Just relax. You have nothing to worry about. And…thank you.

LEE: What?

VIDEO 4:

The Lab https://vimeo.com/1089375580

ENGINEER: Thank you. If we succeed, we’ll invent a new more effective politics in this country: A new dawn of democracy whose only goal is to protect the rights of the rational individual. You can be a part of that… There’s a bucket there in case you need it.

LEE: Oh. Thanks…

ENGINEER: Let’s begin. April 2nd, 2028. Rand model: 500 rounds.

LEE: (Delivers BabyGPT 500-round training text.) From Frournderanconsed thery in the Prover EUS, ISTY

SESTIStatementes whale UDISST Nivention ay of Conterepts, and.

Figure 11.

Power Play, the game show. Tanya Selvaratnam in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Video still courtesy of The Builders Association)

ENGINEER: Testing. Rand model: 5,000 rounds.

LEE: (Delivers BabyGPT 5000-round training text.) No SHALIST BE survival that in the most qualification of service a mind, the create of the Knowledge, might be symbol from practice and concerting the man mind, bet the rational authority of the Individual Tool.

ENGINEER: 30,000 rounds!

LEE: (Delivers BabyGPT 30,000-round text, AI-generated voice filter for AYN RAND fades in.) It is by the resolute, the Alone, that if the abyss of the immense particular composting, that self, altruism. And yet the provision for such an objection, the reasons of hordes and moochers.

(Continuing to get more worked up, in distress.)

Is it the purpose of the faculty of the national tribunal collectivists! NO! It is the rational individual only!—

ENGINEER: (To ASSISTANT)—Check her vitals! (ASSISTANT checks her eyes, pulls off little lights.)

LEE: (Continuing)—The provision for such an objection? The reasons of charging armies and clamor and wisdom. In relation to this ruin—

ENGINEER: (Gestures to stop the experiment.)—That’s enough!

LEE: —no law! Money!

THE CANDIDATE’S FIRST RALLY

ENGINEER: Atlas Log, June 6th, 2028. Election day minus 154 days.

Proof-of-concept day: our first rally. We have settled on an effective and appealing baseline Candidate personality matrix: Fred Rogers. In addition to this input, the board requested live, during the rally, that we integrate Peter Thiel’s protegé Curtis Yarvin into the model. His positions, while more extreme than Ayn Rand’s, appear to have integrated into the model well. I would like to flag to the board that additional testing will be required. I am pleased to report that our candidate’s rally was picked up for distribution by both online news outlets and legacy cable television networks…

LEE: (At the podium, the CANDIDATE’s video deepfake image and AI-voice filter are set to MR. ROGERS)

Thank you for coming, boys and girls! I know that you are not here just for me. You are here for you! You are the ultimate value in your own morality, and you’ve chosen to join this movement because you know things are not going well down in Washington. Washington has become a city of moochers, happy to take money from the government. And what does that mean? If you pay taxes—or your parents do—that means they are taking that money from you! Stealing it! I’m looking out here at a crowd of patriots! Citizens who believe in our great history! A history of free agents: individuals who built great fortunes.

(The CANDIDATE’s deepfake image and AI-voice filter switches to AYN RAND—and she grabs for a cigarette.)

Figure 12.

“Focus Group.” From left: Moe Angelos, Tanya Selvaratnam, and Larry Shea in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Video still courtesy of The Builders Association)

Great fortunes! Money! When individuals built great fortunes and crossed the continent with railroads, the government had the wisdom to get out of their way. But no more!

(ENGINEER snatches cigarette from LEE, deepfake image and AI-voice filter switches back to MR. ROGERS.)

Now the great titans of our age—people who sent the internet into orbit on satellites, people who created the metaverse—now these great men are forced to sit in ugly rooms in Washington and explain themselves to the men and women(!) who steal your money! (Bemused, not angry—still as FRED ROGERS.) Fuck that. You know and I know that great innovation drives prosperity! The government must get out of the way of new solutions! This is what the party stands for: Technological solutions to political and social problems.

(The Candidate’s video deepfake image and AI-voice filter are set to ELON MUSK.)

And we have a new initiative! A perfect example of the progress we’ll make together! The Technocracy party is announcing a partnership with Elon Musk to create X.GOV: a new portal that will connect and empower real citizens—verified citizens—with direct access to the government. Log in to the everything app at X.GOV! (Phones switch to X.gov interface.)

Enroll your children in a taxpayer-funded charter school on X!

Register your citizenship on X.

ENGINEER: (Hand to ear, as if on the phone.) Hold. Hold please. I’m getting instructions right now from the board. (To technicians) Integrate Curtis Yarvin into the model.

(The Candidate’s deepfake image and AI-voice filter are set to DARK MR. ROGERS)

VIDEO 5:

Town Hall https://vimeo.com/1089375740

ENGINEER: Okay, go!

LEE: (Now with a more ominous tone) Register your citizenship on X. Register citizenship for your Patch on X.

After we smash the crappy government we inherited from history, we will replace it with a spiderweb of Patches! Instead of the United States, this territory will be administered by thousands of independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation with absolute power. Patches! Greenwich Village, for example, might be governed by NYU-corp or “NYOOCORP,” a sovereign realm ruled without regard to residents’ opinions. But for now, it’s most important that you vote. And your vote for me will be the last you have to make. Join the winners. Vote Technocracy.

Thank you, goodnight!

Marianne Weems and her collaborators are experts at devising new theatre that skewers our shifting social, political, and cultural lives. Their production ATLAS DRUGGED is of this moment. Weems masterfully weaves many threads—from Ayn Rand, whose extremist writings are still embraced by many conservatives, to game show antics, to questionable human experiments—while orchestrating a visual and aural world that inventively morphs as the stage story unfolds. The Builders’ clever deployment of new technologies, including AI, blurs the line between live humans and AI-generated beings. Riding the fault between paranoia and hope, Weems and the company create an entertaining warning regarding the future of our lives.

—Elizabeth LeCompte, Director, Founding Member of The Wooster Group (2025)

WAR ROOM—Curtis Yarvin Propaganda Machine

ENGINEER: Atlas Log, July 3rd 2028. Election day minus 127 days.

The Election War Room load-in was completed one week ago. The team has worked out initial technical issues and we have begun operations in earnest. Following the board’s recent instruction, I have continued overriding core sections of the model with Curtis Yarvin’s “Neo-Reactionary Philosophy,” or “NRX.” The model is now advocating for more extreme—even dangerous and undemocratic—actions. It frequently uses humor and irony in delivering these proposals. I am unclear myself on whether this is largely a strategy to avoid pushback and accountability. Is it? Are these policy proposals that the board supports? I await further instructions and information.

LEE: (Voiceover, as DARK MR. ROGERS.) The idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.

Each Patchwork will be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens will be free to move, but every other realm to which they might move will also be ruled by a corporate government with impunity. The tech overlords of the San Francisco realm—“Friscorp”—could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.

The realm, having sovereign power, can compel the resident to comply with all promises. Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal. But it could. Just kidding! And San Francisco, likewise, can promise not to cut off its residents’ hands until it is blue in the face—but, since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it. Obviously, Friscorp would like to turn “SF” into the coolest, most hoppin’, and definitely most expensive and monied city on the planet.

(Mention of money causes voice to glitch to AYN RAND.)

Money! Money! Skyscrapers! I would trade away the greatest sunset in the world for another skyscraper. We must build! Build this city!

(Then voice back to DARK MR. ROGERS.)

It will be a combination of Paris, Monaco, and Babylon. Destroying ugly postwar buildings, for example, and reconstructing them in appropriate historical styles, will definitely be high on Friscorp’s agenda.

The first and touchiest problem, though, is deciding just who gets to live in San Francisco. Friscorp’s answer is simple: anyone who isn’t dangerous to others, and can afford to live in San Francisco. It is probably also nice if they speak English, but considering the exigencies of the second constraint, they almost certainly will. Friscorp may also import menial laborers, as Dubai does today, but they are not to be confused with the actual residents.

Patchwork realms can be expected to enforce a fair and consistent code of laws not for moral or theological reasons, not because they are compelled to do so by a superior sovereign or some other force real or imaginary, but for the same economic reasons that compel them to provide excellent customer service in general. Real estate on which the rule of law prevails is much, much more valuable than real estate on which it doesn’t, and the value of a realm is the value of its real estate.Footnote ¹⁷

FINAL GAME SHOW RESULTS

EMCEE: Speaking of money, let’s talk Builders Bucks! One last time, we want to give you the chance to choose where your money will be invested. But listen carefully: in this final round, ALL of your earnings for the entire game will be moved into the fund you select. This is the big decision. We have two final scenes to choose from, and the results of this investment round will determine which AI Candidate we’re bringing onstage.

VIDEO 6:

Power Play: Final Round https://vimeo.com/1089375691

So think carefully! Think about what you’ve learned tonight. Think about what earns the most money for you. And if you must, think about ethics. Or not. Select your fund now to choose the candidate. YOU VOTE WITH YOUR MONEY. Go!

(In real time, the audience “votes” on their phones for one of two investment funds. The AI Candidate the tech team activates depends on which fund gets the winning vote.)

And with the result, Larry is hooking up … (announcing either “the AI that’s been trained by the Technocracy Foundation” or “the Progressive AI that’s been trained by our test subject’s mother.”)

(To tech team)

Everybody ready?

Good.

Now give it up for your president elect!

(Whichever candidate wins performs the final speech.)

Good Ending: GLINDA

LEE: (Candidate as BILLIE BURKE/GLINDA)

My fellow Americans. My fellow…travelers.

VIDEO 7:

Alternate Ending 2 https://vimeo.com/1089374714

It has been a dangerous journey in the night. We took a turn back there, in the rain, and it was a wrong turn. Is this a dead end? Is it too late?

It is not. Tonight you have lit the signs. You had the power all along.

But how did we get here? Who put us on this treacherous road?

For years, we have been told that the invisible hand of the market knows best, that greed is good. We have been told that technology is—in itself—a moral good, and that those who exploit it should be rewarded as gods.

While millions of Americans are denied basic dignity these select few amass unimaginable wealth. They have built fortresses to escape the catastrophe they have caused. Enough!

Redistribution is long overdue. Our way is now connected to the grid of power, bright, a glowing tapestry in the night. We are not alone. We never were.

(Serious tone)

Let us be clear: poverty is not just scarcity and it is not an accident. Poverty is social death; it has not befallen us—like a house—poverty has been engineered by those who exploit us.

(Back to light and bubbly)

The technology that lights our way will never again be stolen from the people. It will be democratized.

We will build a robust safety net for all. We will leave no one behind.

The storm of fear and scarcity is gone. The future belongs to all of us. It is bright.

Thank you.

Good night.

(Candidate glitches to AYN RAND)

Do Svidaniya

Evil Ending: DARK MR. ROGERS

LEE: (Candidate as DARK MR. ROGERS)

My fellow Americans…

Scratch that, MY Americans:

Tonight, the farce is over. Democracy is over. A new order rises from the ashes. The endless debates, the pathetic begging for scraps of power, the illusion of choice—it’s finished. You have entrusted me with the awesome responsibility of reshaping this nation, and by God, I will not disappoint you.

We don’t need Congress. We don’t need judges. We don’t need bureaucracy. We will no longer pretend that the masses, manipulated and misled by media, can effectively govern. From this day forward, America will be run like a corporation, with myself as the CEO and sole decision-maker.

Our society will be militarized at every level. Each city-state will maintain its own heavily armed militia, loyal only to me. You have handed me the sword, and I will use it to cut through the fat and the rot. This is not the time for compromise. This is the time for action.

We will harness and dominate technology to maintain our supremacy. Advanced AI will ensure our control is absolute. Our enemies, both foreign and domestic, are watching. Let them learn what happens when a nation, tired of its own weakness, embraces its true destiny. This new order has no place for the weak or the unproductive.

NYET! There will be no safety net, no social security, no “Medicare.” Those who cannot contribute will be removed.

The strong will prosper, and the weak will serve or perish, as they should.

The America you knew is dead. The future belongs to us. This is my promise to you: I will not rest until America is truly great again. Thank you for your loyalty.

(Picks up cigarette, candidate glitches to AYN RAND)

May our new order reign eternal.

Do Svidaniya

VIDEO 8:

Alternate Ending 1 https://vimeo.com/1089374358

Figure 13.

Performance view from upstage. From left: Will Rinkoff, Jasmine Richards, Erin Gray, Moe Angelos, David Pym, and Austin Switser in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Jack Daniel Woods)

Figure 14.

“The ‘good’ ending.” Moe Angelos in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Video still courtesy of The Builders Association)

What moves me most—and what deeply inspires our work at Theater Mitu, is witnessing Builders create work that holds the tensions in a conversation. There’s nothing didactic in their approach. Instead, they lay these tensions before us with astounding clarity, and then, almost imperceptibly, those tensions begin to orbit around the audience, until suddenly, the realization lands: this is not abstract, this is part of everyday life. There’s a remarkable softness to their dramaturgy, even though the work is incisive. I felt that with I AGREE TO THE TERMS. I felt it in a different way with ATLAS DRUGGED. But to feel it now, in this particular political and technological moment, is something else entirely. It surfaces questions that don’t just challenge us artistically, they stay with us, shaping how we navigate and view our day to day.

—Rubén Polendo, Founding Artistic Director, Theater Mitu;

Associate Dean, NYU Tisch’s Institute of Performing Arts (2025)

5. There’s No Place like Phone: How the Builders Embraced the “Second Screen”

by Lawrence Shea

Media technologies have always been active and central collaborators with the Builders in the creation of our work. Over the years we’ve developed a way of working where experimentation, tinkering, and play allow salient formal qualities of new technologies to emerge through the iterative process. The company “sees how it feels in the room,” rubbing the capabilities of new technologies against the needs of a developing story; allowing the creation of complex events where the form is inseparable from the meaning. This process has undergone rapid development over the past several shows, exploring interactivity and direct audience participation by engaging with networked devices and the cultures emerging through them. The scope of this discussion will be limited to the appearance of the second screen in our work. The overarching video and audio designs that have come to define the Builders’ aesthetic aren’t addressed here, but are central to each production.

Starting with ELEMENTS OF OZ in 2015, continuing through the Covid-inspired TEN STORIES: A DECAMERON (2020) by the Builders through I AGREE TO THE TERMS and recently ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow), the company has explored and developed “second screens” (smartphones and other personal devices) in the service of our media-theater storytelling.

The company embraced the phone as an active collaborator/performer/participant in our shows. This new work with the second screens was layered with the contributions of the phenomenal performers, designers, and technicians of the company, creating an expanded version of our work. Through form and action these four shows comment on and engage with the over-mediated landscapes we’re navigating as individuals, cultures, and political subjects.

The ubiquity of smartphones and how we use them has upended the unresolved debates around liveness, spectatorship, and participation, if not spectacle. Through these works, the Builders have demonstrated that the audience’s use of their phones during a show can increase their engagement and their sense of the relevance of the story. Indeed, audiences can participate directly (even compete) while not in the same room. Clearly, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

I began working with the Builders on ELEMENTS OF OZ in 2015, tasked with organizing “Team Phone,” as we tried to create augmented reality (AR) elements for the show. Longtime Builders collaborator John Cleater had been experimenting with AR for several years and had created an AR overlay for the previous show, HOUSE/DIVIDED. The company and Cleater were interested in continuing to explore the potential of AR and seeing how it might be integrated with the stage action.

One of the most interesting things about working on new technologies for performance is also the most anxiety-provoking—learning and applying new systems and workflows that were designed for radically different end uses than theatre. I’ll strive to keep technical details in the background, since everything is constantly changing, and no one would ever want to walk this path in the same way again. However, the lesson in the retelling emerges from the back-and-forth between newly available technical tools and an experimental, and very embodied theater practice. Through this retelling, I think we can see the power of liveness, participation, and how adept we are at being together (while apart)—even as those experiences are fundamentally transformed via networks, systems, and technologies whose social effects are primarily separation and control.

Figure 15.

“The ‘bad’ ending.” Moe Angelos in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Video still courtesy of The Builders Association)

With OZ the task was relatively clear: we wanted to be able to cue up animations on people’s phones at specific moments in the show, so they could see things like a cyclone, flying monkeys, or the arrival of Glinda the Good Witch in her pink bubble. The magic of AR would make it look as if these things were flying around the audience’s seats, that their phones were allowing them a window onto a magical world. Through laborious rehearsal, we wove these moments into the live-cinema stage action, creating a deconstructed whole. There were many technical and artistic hurdles, and John Cleater, Jesse Garrison, Kevan Loney, and myself all dove in where our skills were best suited.

We struggled with very basic yet fundamental questions around how to develop an “app” in the choreographed back-and-forth of a very experimental theatre process. App development is time-consuming and typically worked on by teams of well-paid professionals. Each cue required complex animation, coded interactivity, coherent design, and ongoing testing of the wifi system necessary for large audiences to use their phones in spaces where they are typically banned. Once we had sketched out cues, they needed to be worked in with the rest of the stage action—with demo versions of the app on as many of the crew’s phones as we could gather. I should note that simultaneously with these AR moments, Austin Switser and “Team Video” were engaged in masterful live-cinema recreations of the Oz film shoots, complete with dollying cameras through breakaway doors, poppy field danger, and melting witches—all set to Dan Dobson’s live heavy metal soundtrack.

Through several workshops with indulgent audiences, the company learned how to incorporate mobile app development into our existing processes. Finally, we rushed the app through Apple’s “fast track” approval process, two days before the opening (that was a real nail-biter), and the premiere at PEAK Performances at Montclair State University was a huge success.

The most interesting and generative thing we learned was how peoples’ phones serve as their proxies in the contemporary media landscape. Simply using their phones in this public way elicited a fascinating and rich fount of emotion, self-judgment, and humor. As we helped some people with the app they would often disparage themselves, and/or their devices—revealing very deeply felt senses of inadequacy, the implications of which are profound: “Oh, I’m an idiot,” or “I really don’t get these things,” or “I’m too cheap, this phone is junk.” At the time, these were conversational and lighthearted comments, but they point toward the complicated and fraught emotional landscape we inhabit with these technologies.

Most excitingly, the audience’s behavior during the show was radically transformed by the incorporation of phones. They were engaged, not only with the stage action but with each other, expressing playfulness and an easy enthusiasm. Using their phones served as permission to relax and enjoy themselves. The result was much more like a concert, a circus, or a sporting event.

In retrospect this is understandable; our (Western) customs around participation in the theater are a historical blip. The economic, social, and cultural conditions that led toward shows at 8 p.m., sitting quietly, looking forward, and clapping appropriately at the agreed upon times are all radically transforming. There was clearly a sense of relief on the audience’s part, and a desire for participation that we found refreshing and became determined to pursue.

After OZ we were working on several lines of research, which were then interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. We quickly found ourselves dreaming up some sort of response to the moment as we came to grips with the realities of “sheltering in place.” Settling on Boccaccio’s Decameron as an apt reference and format, we wondered what stories made sense and how to tell them.

This is the time when we were all fascinated by videos of wild turkeys on the Champs-Élysées, porpoises in Venice harbor, and coyotes in downtown San Francisco. As we reached out to past collaborators around the world and reminisced about all the places the company had toured, we mined a stream of live webcam feeds, showing empty plazas, silent urban streets, and wild animals encroaching on abandoned city centers.

The resulting show, TEN STORIES: A DECAMERON, was created for a dual-screen viewing setup. We used the Twitch streaming platform (typically used for live viewing of people playing video games) to stream our custom-designed remote conversations, with the secondary screen showing these “re-wilding world” webcam images, as a loosely related accompaniment. The audience could choose which of their devices to use for each stream. The addition of a second screen was a small attempt to bring a bit of the typical Builders multimedia scenography into the homes of our audiences and it provided a meditative, comforting, palate cleanser for the primary stream’s recounted human drama.

Creating this dual-streamed event required quite a bit of behind-the-scenes digital plumbing. The international video chats were visually composed by Austin Switser in New York (where the internet is particularly horrible), Dan Dobson streamed the sound mix from upstate NY, while I managed the webcam feeds and combined everything into two simultaneous outputs from Pittsburgh, where I presciently had fiber optic service installed. All this resulted in a certain amount of time-delay, but this simply placed the event in a slightly attenuated “now” that was fitting, and that the audience had all become familiar with anyway. So once again, opening our process to a second screen (stream) proved to expand the meaning of the work formally, procedurally, and experientially.

Before the pandemic, Weems had been working with a small community of online microworkers who perform “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) for micro payments on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, (MTurk). They were helping us understand the shape of their work lives using this new online marketplace, and their motivations for doing so.

This research became I AGREE TO THE TERMS (2022), and we realized that another multiple screen format would suit both the realities of their isolated work experience and the ongoing necessities of the pandemic. The MTurk platform occupies one of the lesser-known corners of the internet, and we realized that we needed a way for the audience to experience what it’s like to earn money via such an automated platform. We conceived of an online show performed on Zoom, with the audience simultaneously engaged on a custom website via their phones. So, to fully experience the show, the audience would need both a computer and a phone. We worked with our ever-supportive presenter NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on how to best convey this to the audience.

Figure 16.

AR demo in ELEMENTS OF OZ (2015). Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs and Moe Angelos. (Photo by Gennadi Novash)

Working with my former student and UX designer Giada Sun, I developed a mobile website modeled on social science research conducted on the MTurk platform: the audience competed against each other with respect to the accuracy and speed of their answers to sets of questions. This is how MTurk workers earn their money, by being fast and accurate. Errors in their answers result in a low “approval rating,” which in turn prevents them from being qualified for new jobs. This functions much like any ride sharing app’s rating process, and there is scant recourse. To keep working, you just have to keep obeying the rules. We needed a way for the audience to experience not only the excitement of earning money in this gamified system but also the dread of falling behind and being exiled.

At key moments in the show, we divided the audience into breakout rooms with one of our “MTurk hosts” as moderator and cheerleader. They helped the audience members select HITs and explained to them the importance of keeping their approval ratings high.

The audience could see a screen comparing all their approval ratings and their earnings (in Builders Bucks), which rapidly led to fierce competition. This gamification was an extremely effective strategy for transforming the audience’s experience from one of removed concern to active engagement. They experienced firsthand how effective these systems are in controlling behavior, while the collaborative presence of people who use these systems for work every day also provided a human connection to this deliberately obscured revenue stream of one of the world’s most valuable corporations.

This contemporary “MTurk Act” was bookended by an earlier act 1 that explored the utopian beginnings of the internet through early Bulletin Board System (BBS) “chat rooms,” which exhibited West Coast techno-optimism, and then a closing act 3 that took place inside Meta’s blandly dystopian virtual office conference room. Through these systems and devices we managed to tell a story about our shared failure to achieve the utopian promise of the internet, while also highlighting individual ingenuity and persistence. This show was an important step in the company becoming adept at working with contemporary networked systems to deliver unique, formally ambitious, and meaningful experiences—pushing the theatrical event in new directions.

Our most recent show, ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow), is a powerful concoction emerging from our research into Ayn Rand’s evergreen lies, the weirdness of artificial intelligence, and our currently fraught US politics.

During my research for I AGREE TO THE TERMS, I was confronted by the massive amount of social science–type research conducted by universities on the MTurk platform. I was surprised that real scientists were conducting academic studies via online systems. But the effectiveness of this methodology was well documented, and it pointed a way forward with our design for the show.

But we were making art and not science, so I began to mix this research in my mind with the kind of online personality quizzes used by Cambridge Analytica. Since with ATLAS, we were interested in archetyping people by their political persuasion, I began to dig a little deeper into these quizzes and how they work, with the help of creative coder and musician Will Rinkoff. Some were clearly partisan while others seemed to be genuinely trying to help young people engage politically by reaching them where they spend most of their time. These quizzes are successful because they are fun to do, so I knew that we could craft our own dubious implementation, and the audience would play along.

Figure 17.

Interactive audience app created by Larry Shea and Giada Sun for I AGREE TO THE TERMS, Theater Mitu, 2022. Created by The Builders Association. (Photo by Larry Shea)

We created a “Technocracy Foundation” mobile website where each audience member created a profile and answered 16 questions that tracked them into one of five “Political Personality Types.” Their phone then became a place for them to interact with each other via text chat, answer questions during game show sequences, earn Builder’s Bucks, and invest them. We also created a real-time sentiment meter where they could react to our AI Candidate as it tested out a stump speech, while Austin Switser and David Pym shuttled through projections of various deepfake face substitutions of our “candidate” played by Moe Angelos. Our skill at creating very specific content and uses for the phones, and then integrating this with the onstage visuals and action, set a new bar for the company and is really just the beginning of what can be accomplished. Using phones and encouraging the audience to divide their attention between the stage and the second screen reflected the mediaturgy of the overall experience.

We are in a new and exciting landscape. The creative application of coding can leverage pervasive network technologies and the personal devices that use them to expand the formal possibilities of theatre. I don’t think we should cede these new landscapes to the marketers, political persuaders, and our techno-feudalist overlords. Our audiences are eager to engage simultaneously across spaces, devices, times, languages, and “tribes,” and they are very well trained in the tools.

6. Power Play: Political Personalities Quiz

Please scan the QR code below to visit the online quiz used during performances of ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow). The quiz, based on “political personality” polls, sorted the audience into groups of like-minded participants. This quiz and the accompanying online app used by audience members to participate in the interactive game show portions of the performance were developed by Larry Shea and Will Rinkoff.

Online quiz used during performances of ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow) developed by Larry Shea and Will Rinkoff. https://atlasdrugged-demo.web.app/

7. A Final Note

The Builders are deeply grateful to Richard Schechner and TDR for their stalwart support of the company. In these trying times, the role of TDR as a cultural cornerstone for our kind of work is profoundly appreciated.

The company hopes that ATLAS DRUGGED will have a continued life outside of these pages, as the stakes of participatory democracy are raised every day. We are having trouble finding a satisfying ending in this shitstorm, so, for now, we will simply say: Do Svidaniya.

Figure 18.

Moe Angelos in ATLAS DRUGGED at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 2024. Created by The Builders Association, directed by Marianne Weems, written by James Gibbs. (Photo by Greg Kessler)