{"id":158859,"date":"2025-08-19T16:49:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T16:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/158859\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T16:49:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T16:49:22","slug":"anthropology-at-matrix-theatre-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/158859\/","title":{"rendered":"anthropology at Matrix Theatre Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The\u00a0North American Premiere of Lauren Gunderson\u2019s\u00a0<strong>anthropology<\/strong>, directed by John Perrin Flynn, launches Rogue Machine\u2019s new season on their mainstage. This\u00a0high-stakes AI thriller is wrapped in emotional urgency while questioning just\u00a0how far we\u2019ll go to uncover truth and what technology can and can\u2019t help us resolve in our relationships.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Merril is one of Silicon Valley\u2019s 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 \u2018virtual Angie\u2019 offers her some solace \u2013 until, that is, it starts to reveal new details about the real Angie&#8217;s disappearance. The title of this play is deliberately styled and published as anthropology, in all lower case.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201canthropology\u00a0was a risk to write,\u201d believes Lauren Gunderson. \u201cAll 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\u00a0heated 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\u00a0work. I wanted this weird, dark, churning, funny, brutalist play to live in its own universe. But technology exposes our\u00a0humanity (good and bad), so as with any other play of mine, this one is about\u00a0people\u00a0not things. It&#8217;s about a family not AI, it&#8217;s about sisters not technology.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The cast includes\u00a0<strong>Alexandra Hellquist,<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>Kaylee Kaneshiro<\/strong>,\u00a0<strong>Julia Manis<\/strong>,\u00a0<strong>Nan McNamara.<\/strong>*\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201canthropology\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>opens at\u00a08pm on Saturday, October 4, and runs at\u00a08pm Fridays, Saturdays, Mondays; 2pm Sundays through November 9, 2025 (no performances on Monday, 10\/6). Rogue Machine, in the Matrix Theatre, is located at 7657 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90046.\u00a0Tickets are $45, with senior and student discounts. Show4Less on Fridays Oct. 10 ($15+), Oct. 17 ($20+), Oct. 24 ($20+), Nov. 1 ($25)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The\u00a0North American Premiere of Lauren Gunderson\u2019s\u00a0anthropology, directed by John Perrin Flynn, launches Rogue Machine\u2019s new season on their&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":158860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,224,5337],"class_list":{"0":"post-158859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-los-angeles","12":"tag-losangeles"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115056460866435924","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}