TEMPING Comes to the Edinburgh Fringe Next Month

Contrasting the anonymity of recording births and deaths in Excel spreadsheet with furtive moments of human intimacy, interactive show from Dutch Kills Theater and Wolf 359 examines mortality, capitalism and the value of a human life. Sarah Jane Tully, a 53-year-old actuary, has gone on vacation and the audience member steps in to cover for her. As they update her spreadsheets, they realize her job involves calculating the life expectancy of strangers. Meanwhile, an intra-office romance is spilling out of the printer, and all the inner life of Sarah is there for anyone who has access to her cubicle and computer. As the audience member completes tasks, which colleagues will they decide to trust, and will they stumble on the formula to predict their own lifespan? Temping is a show with no performers, just an audience and the ether.

Temping is an interactive solo show performed by the audience with the collaboration of a Windows PC, a corporate phone, a laser printer and Microsoft Office. Each show is unique to the audience member and dependent on their input: which of their unseen co-workers they trust, what they find in the office, and how deep they decide to pry.

Writer Michael Yates Crowley said, "I was interested in the idea that inanimate objects and technology could be performers. That I could write for a phone or fax machine the way you would write for an actor. Or at least that characters could speak through these devices - just as in our lives, particularly during the worst moments of the pandemic, the people that matter to us appear as messages and phone calls and streaming video.

"Temping is a play about work, and what it means to die with work partly done, as we all must. Now that the pandemic has forced us to rethink our relationship to office buildings and commutes, the play has become about the workplace itself: the strange little funhouse mirror of life and relationships that exists in an office. What was satire has become a slanted sort of elegy for the way we used to work."

Dutch Kills Theater is a theatre company based in New York that focuses on developing and producing new writing by the most exciting emerging artists in the city. Formed in 2011, the company were previously at the Edinburgh Fringe with The Sister by Eric John Meyer and Adventure Quest by Richard Lovejoy in 2016. They followed this with the critically-acclaimed The Providence of Neighbouring Bodies by Jean Ann Douglass in 2018, and Solitary - a searing exploration of the use of solitary confinement in the US prison system by Duane Cooper and Blake Haberman - in 2019. In 2021 they performed the immersive UK premiere of Ben Beckley and Asa Wember's KlaxAlterian Sequester on demand. Dutch Kills are also presenting Intelligence at Assembly Roxy.

Wolf 359 is a New York City-based company of narrative technologists. Their work exists at the intersection of theatre, technology, and experience. Since the company's founding in 2007 by Michael Yates Crowley and Michael Rau, Wolf 359 work has been shown in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Dublin, Edinburgh, and many other cities and city-states. Previous shows at Edinburgh Festival Fringe include Righteous Money

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