Someday We’ll Find It

A play written by Google search suggestions and ChatGPT shouldn’t be as compelling as this – it certainly should be so emotional. Yet what Zachary Sheridan and Karla Livingstone-Pardy have created from these unfeeling and non-judgemental sources is spellbinding. Mirroring the rabbit holes that are all too easy to disappear into when searching for something innocuous, the story is a skilful assembly of choices that Sheridan and Livingstone-Pardy have taken to provide not so much a narrative, as a stream of consciousness from unconscious algorithms.

The set is a collection of 1990s tech – a Macintosh computer; a monitor that is fat, not flat; a wastepaper basket, and archive boxes. Sheridan is alone on the stage, dressed in a cream suit, mostly emotionless himself, as he reels off the list of suggestions the computer systems provide with a leading question of ‘where is’ or ‘how to’. The genius is in the curation of these to make us laugh, then offer recognition as something we have done before – before Sheridan tells us of searches more desperate and sad. It’s galling to realise that they might be system-selected, but all these prompts were originally human-generated.

There’s even a play-within-a-play written by ChatGPT, which is unsurprisingly clunky, overly logical and ignorant of human emotion, yet it’s hilarious because of that, even if we’re uncomfortable admitting there’s enough of a thread running through that a human could develop.

Its message is one of how, in an age of screens, we are more connected than ever before, just not so much to each other: we look to our technology for everything, including the resolution of our emotional distress.

The play is not just reciting computer prompts: Sheridan is very physical (and funny) in demonstrating what they tell him to do, and his interactions with the physical objects around the set are touching. There are lots of clever metaphors in these actions that are better for not being fully explained. Unlike the search engine, we are going to have to think and feel these answers for ourselves.

Review by Mark Wickett

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