Jay Stull's THE SINGULARITY PLAY to be Presented at Actors' Theatre Grand Rapids

Actors' Theatre Grand Rapids will continue its 2026-27 season with the Michigan premiere of Stull's The Singularity Play, running October 8-17 at Spectrum Theater on the campus of Grand Rapids Community College.

Google has hired a team of actors to collaborate with Denise, an artificial intelligence playwright, on the development of a new theatrical work. Gathered in a conference room at the company's Manhattan offices, the actors rehearse, improvise, answer questions and offer the distinctly human raw material Denise needs to make a play.

At first, the experiment feels almost playful: an unusual creative process built around the increasingly familiar question of what artificial intelligence might be capable of producing. But The Singularity Play quickly pushes beyond the novelty of AI-generated art.

As Denise learns from the people in the room, the boundaries between observation and participation begin to shift. The actors bring their own histories, relationships, insecurities, desires and grief into the process, and what begins as an artistic experiment gradually becomes something more personal and intimate. And the play itself refuses to remain contained by its initial premise.

What begins in a Google conference room eventually opens into something far more expansive, carrying its characters-and its audience-into unexpected territory. Without abandoning its humor or its fascination with technology, Stull allows the experiment to evolve into something more intimate, emotional and deeply concerned with the ways people reach for one another across distance, change and loss.

For all of its technological machinery, The Singularity Play is ultimately less interested in asking whether artificial intelligence can successfully imitate human beings than in examining what human beings believe makes us distinct in the first place.

The Actors' Theatre production features Nancy Hoffman as Lauren/Hollis, Kendra Jones as Heidi/Jules, Linnae Caurdy as Alice/Royal, Chris Smith as Jason/Quinn, Oliver Vanderboegh as Henry/Finley, Lindsey Gram as Denise/Dennis, Nate Reynolds as Greg/Salem, Bob Troszok as Ocean, Sarah Glyszon as Dawn and Antonio Aguilar as Skyler.