A Piece of Work at BAM Fisher

To sleep. To dream. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we confront the most fundamental questions of our humanity. But what exactly do we confront when the play is shuffled, reordered, and rewritten by a computer?

In this daring marriage of live acting and artificial intelligence, Obie Award-winning director Annie Dorsen delivers a provocative parsing of Shakespeare’s work. Based on a sophisticated algorithm that generates a new version of the play nightly—words, visuals, lighting, music, and all—A Piece of Work features one actor, alternating between Obie winner Scott Shepherd (Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, The Wooster Group’s Hamlet) and theater legend Joan MacIntosh, a looming computer screen, and a chorus of synthesized voices channeling this uncanny text, refashioned in the automated image of our digital times.