About the Project
Congratulations on your successful cryogenic freeze and welcome to the year 2148! Get ready to enjoy the sights, sounds, tastes, and technologies of the future during this interactive orientation. The air is fresh, the food is fun, and the robots like to party.
“iWannaDie: One Robot’s Hilarious Struggle to Find a Reason to Live”, is a live theatre performance that originally took place in the HopKins Black Box theatre at Louisiana State University. It is a dystopian comedy set in the year 2148 that explores how contemporary problems of consumerism, inequality, and artificial intelligence might play out in the future.
The show is centered around the premise that the audience has been cryogenically frozen in the year 2020 and revived in the year 2148. Two representatives from the futuristic country of the Associated States of Americorp are tasked with ensuring that the audience leaves with a positive impression of the year 2148. However, the goals of the Americorporate representatives are thwarted when an advanced artificial intelligence named Gregor, refuses to accept his role in the show and attempts to commit suicide in protest.
“iWannaDie” was written by two LSU undergraduates, Jonathan Verret and Courtney Waters. The idea began when Courtney and Jonathan decided to work together on their final project in their Performance Composition class in 2019. Over coffee, a conversation about a Roomba that tragically leaped from a kitchen counter into the flood waters of 2016 morphed into an idea for a show about a suicidal robot. Would a robot of significant intelligence want to live with us? Or would it see right through our attempts to gloss over the truth and refuse to play the game of life at all?
Production Team
