This chapter takes the distinctive materiality of the modern stage, the homely table, as a way to place two very different productions into conversation: Forced Entertainment’s Table Top Shakespeare and Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer. Although these two productions might trace the arc from the residual (telling a story at a table using small household items) to the emergent (a dialogue between an AI-generated reconstruction of a lost Aeschylus play and a narrative composed of citations), they also dramatize an increasing absorption of the human into the apparatus of performance, a possibly fearsome absorption traced through Dorsen’s work, and touching on a range of other contemporary performances, including Mona Pirnot’s I Love You So Much I Could Die.