work.txt by Nathan Ellis is an interactive, participatory theatre piece that explores work. art and the end of the world.  There are no actors, except for the audience and whoever is pushing the buttons that move things along.  There’s a computer screen.  It instructs the audience what to do, what to say, what to sing.  It asks for volunteers.  But the volunteers don’t know whether they will be given a task that lasts seconds or whether they will play a major role in the unfolding drama.  One volunteer becomes the principal protagonist of the show.  They alone have a name.  But I’m jumping ahead.  First we must create the city where millions go to places called “workplaces” to do stuff called “work”.  We do this with Jenga blocks.  It’s fun and looks cool.  But back to our protagonist.

Last night a woman named Katja became the “social media relations brand manager” at the centre of the story.  She creates Tweets for retweeting and Instagram posts for sharing.  She does it for Coca-Cola or Shell or some other big brand.  If she did it for Russia or North Korea she would be an “Internet troll” not a “social media relations brand manager”.  Ironically Katja’s decision to refuse to create more meaningless “content” creates an internet sensation.  She becomes a meme.  A trendy gallery even creates an installation about her to the perplexity of the vacationer who just wants to see the Monets.

Her parents, on a cruise, that’s busier than “work”, show us we can fill up our time as efficiently as Amazon; whose human workers ($21/hr) are ruthlessly scheduled by algorithmic work study bots ($0/hr).  Even automation has been automated.  We learn about the Pyramids.  They are really old but were they built efficiently?  We help millions of people; commuters, coffee drinkers, joggers, Geminis, do lots of pointless things.

 We do it happily and loudly.  We chant in unison.  We even sing, which is quite impressive as we don’t have the music.  And we volunteer.  Oh do we volunteer.  Especially Katja but others read their scripts into microphones or obey the instructions on the provided headphones or shout lines projected on the screen.  None of the volunteers bottles out.  We help the “workers” make so much useless stuff that the overheated planet comes to a fiery end, Jeff Bezos dies on Mars aged 150 and eventually Time itself calls it a day (or whatever unit of whatever it no longer is it feels like).

I hope I’ve made this sound crazy.  Because it is.  It’s also great fun, thought provoking and strangely moving.  It’s a great example of the Theatre Centre stretching the boundaries of “theatre” in ways that few people in Toronto do.  There are two more shows; tonight (Thursday) and tomorrow (Friday) at 8pm.