When The Builders Association began working on their Ayn Rand–inspired, technofeudalist-satirizing production of ATLAS DRUGGED (Tools for Tomorrow), the 2024 election was still years away. By the time the show premiered at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in October 2024, it was just around the corner. This dossier—comprising an interview with Richard Schechner, commentary, script excerpts, and a summary of the Builders’ mediaturgy—is a comprehensive examination of the factors that influenced the genesis of ATLAS DRUGGED, and the ludicrous “predictions” made by the sprawling, technologically advanced work that have since come true.

Here There Are Blueberries (2018–ongoing), the Tectonic Theater Project’s most recent work, tells the story of a photo album from Auschwitz collected in 1944 by Obersturmführer Karl-Friedrich Höcker, adjutant to camp commander SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. The photos, now at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, show Nazi soldiers, their families, and concentration-extermination camp staff relaxing and socializing. Tectonic not only presents the photos but also investigates curating, memory, and historical responsibility. The interview details the process that brought Here There Are Blueberries into existence.

Through its arrangement of projections, figures, light, colors, sound, and spoken text, Sudden Rise (2019) by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion creates a posthuman world, transgressing the boundaries of representation and presence to rethink our civilization in relation to the rest of nature.

The postsubjective theatre of Sudden Rise (2019) by Wu Tsang and the collective Moved by the Motion denies human agency, suggesting instead a posthuman world, and brings the theatrical paradox of action and subjectivity to light. Sudden Rise’s hyperaffective timelessness heralds a posthuman world, both in reality and in theatre. Characterized by collectivity, entanglement, and synesthesia, the working mode of Tsang’s team of artists frames and codetermines the theatrical experience.

Contemporary visual artist Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series stages and documents her reparative practice of taking self-portraits in sites around New York City where enslaved Africans lived, died, and are buried. Considering Faustine’s self-portrait series not only as photography but also as performance documentation invites theorizations of memorial practices (rather than monumental objects) and their affordances for liberatory aesthetic projects.

When two black male directors produce university productions of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview in different parts of the country at the same time, they bond over their shared understanding of the white gaze, and how black people are created and viewed in the white imagination, both in the play and in their own lives.

Conversational theatre is a medium for facilitating dialog on race, privilege, and discrimination in Swedish society. Du Contrat Social, a performance based on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract, demonstrates how theatre can create an interactive space where audience members actively reflect on their social positioning and implicit biases. By guiding the audience through exercises that expose implicit stereotypes and encourage self-reflection, the performance fosters a unique setting for transformative learning.

Akira Takayama’s McDonald’s Radio University (2017) transforms McDonald’s fast-food restaurants into auditory and affective performance spaces for collective reflection and sociopolitical engagement. Migrant “professors,” seated inside, deliver lectures via portable radios. Drawing from Brechtian radio theatre, Takayama foregrounds the ethics of listening, urging audiences to confront vulnerability and marginalization within noisy, unpredictable public spaces devoid of theatre’s protective distance.

Nacera Belaza asks a dancer to “be sound.” This is not a metaphor, nor is it a request for the dancer to produce sound, talk, or sing. It is a task given with little explanation but meant to unlock a way of performing without pretending, stirring up questions about the historically racialized possibility of realness, transparency, and transmission, and drawing attention to profound sensory experiences that might never be clear. Here, performing one impossible task (being sound) becomes instructive in doing another (writing dance).

Dan Friedman, a cofounder and artistic director emeritus of the Castillo Theatre in New York City, interviews Daniel Maposa, the founder and executive director of Savanna Trust, a politically engaged theatre based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Their conversation covers the history of political theatre in Zimbabwe from colonial times to the present.

In July 2023, drag artist Pura Luka Vega’s Ama Namin (Our Father) performance in “Jesus drag” went viral across the Philippine archipelago. Many deemed Luka’s performance blasphemous, and they were declared persona non grata and imprisoned twice. This kanalization is a process where Christian fundamentalists, conservative publics, and state officials tag bakla (often conflated with being gay or transfeminine) as kanal (canal or sewer), deserving imprisonment and even death. By queering worship, bakla communities challenge anti-bakla regimes.

Thomas Riccio’s analysis of Sophia, the social robot developed by Hanson Robotics, presents her as a liminal figure at the intersection of myth, technology, and identity, embodying both ancient archetypes and emergent posthuman imaginaries. Sophia’s design, evolution, and media presence challenge conventional notions of agency, consciousness, and embodiment and raising questions on the broader ethical, ontological, and social dimensions of human-machine coevolution. As a speculative interface, Sophia redefines subjectivity within the horizon of a technologically mediated future.