Created by Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton
A Lester Trips (Theatre) Production
Presented by Factory Theatre
A famous actor, cancelled for his cannibal texts and convicted of heinous assaults, is sentenced to read hundreds of thousands of pages of erotic fanfiction, with the aim of training a large AI to identify obscenity that violates a social media platform’s standards.
Driven by a ferocious boredom, and reaching his own tolerance for cringe content shockingly fast, he pesters his lawyer to trade in his sentence on an experimental free market of generally unpleasant tasks. He soon discovers a shorter sentence on paper does not necessarily feel shorter in the human body. In this world, an augmented-reality autosadistic trip through content moderation hell is all in a day’s work.
A new body horror speculative fiction from the creators of Honey I’m Home.
Content Warnings: Mature language. Repeated mentions of sexual assault. References to sexualization of minors and online child sexual abuse materials. This show deals with obscene content on the internet – if it’s on the internet, it could be mentioned in this show. Please be advised.
Environmental Warnings: Loud sounds that include screaming, flashing and strobe lights, projection and video, and the use of multiple blackouts.
Click here for Public Consumption’s electronic house program.
A more detailed explanation of the content is available in the Public Consumption Access Guide.
Image Design by Awake Studio
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Creators
Lester Trips (Theatre) is Lauren Gillis (left) and Alaine Hutton (right), a performing/writing/directing/designing duo with a decade of shared training in physical performance and making people uncomfortable. We create questionably comedic theatre, film, and “digital not otherwise specified”, often revolving around the internet ruining our brains, distorting our sexualities, and how we all can’t stop looking at it.
Lester’s performance foundation stems from butoh-based embodiment with Denise Fujiwara and Fides Krucker’s approach to extended range vocal practice, Emotionally Integrated Voice.
Previous works include ghost stories about erotic repression Mr. Truth (Why Not Theatre’s RISER/ Theatre Centre 2018), a peri-apocalyptic deformation of the wizard of oz Intangible Trappings (2016), men’s dating seminar gone wrong Safe and Sorry (SummerWorks 2019), and a speculative fiction/cringe comedy series streaming on CBCGem, Content Farm (2023), and body horror mystery Honey I’m Home (Factory Theatre, 2024).
Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton are the writers, performers, directors, producers, set, props, & costume designers of Public Consumption.
