anthropology at Matrix Theatre

The North American Premiere of Lauren Gunderson’s anthropology, directed by John Perrin Flynn, launches Rogue Machine’s new season on their mainstage. This high-stakes AI thriller is wrapped in emotional urgency while questioning just how far we’ll go to uncover truth and what technology can and can’t help us resolve in our relationships. Directed by John Perrin Flynn, the cast includes Alexandra Hellquist, Kaylee Kaneshiro, Julia Manis, Nan McNamara.

Merril is one of Silicon Valley’s leading software engineers, but her life disintegrates when her younger sister Angie vanishes on her way home from college. A year later, when the police have long abandoned their search, Merril assembles all the digital material Angie has left behind and sets about building herself a digital simulation of her sister. The resultant ‘virtual Angie’ offers her some solace – until, that is, it starts to reveal new details about the real Angie's disappearance. The title of this play is deliberately styled and published as anthropology, in all lower case.

“anthropology was a risk to write,” believes Lauren Gunderson. “All plays are I suppose, but this one came to me just after ChatGPT launched publicly in 2023 and AI became truly inescapable. I felt the heated surge of an idea written about this new tool that felt both new and old: a thriller, a mystery, a race against time and tech. This play is unlike most of my others, so much so that I almost used a pen name so audiences would experience it without any context to my other work. I wanted this weird, dark, churning, funny, brutalist play to live in its own universe. But technology exposes our humanity (good and bad), so as with any other play of mine, this one is about people not things. It's about a family not AI, it's about sisters not technology.”