Written by Ben Holbrook and Directed by Dante Green
The Makers’ Ensemble | 281 N. 7th St. Brooklyn, NY 11211.
October 22-November 8, 2026
Photo Credit by Angel J. Rivas
What does it mean to be human, especially when tech is so ingrained into our lives? And the interactions that we have with each other: are they genuine or are we just trying to extract something from the other person? These two questions are integral to the creation of theatre and storytelling, and Ben Holbrook’s play User Agreement tackles them in some incredibly inventive ways.
Two soulmates meet in an ethereal space and discuss the myriad lives they’ve lived across time on this planet we call Earth, and we are dropped into their most recent crossing of souls on a dance floor in Brooklyn. We follow the two souls, Sy (played by the charming Vann Dukes) and Theo (the purposefully detached Marvelyn Ramirez), as they navigate discovering each other in these forms and this incredibly modern technological world they’re living in.
Our two old souls are in vastly different fields of work: Sy, a marine biologist working with an octopus (an ethereal é boylan), and Theo in tech advertising, but don’t ask about it because they don’t want to talk about it.
Lighting designer Hayley Garcia Parnell made excellent use of the space: a white box in an alleyway set up. I forgot the walls were painted white, and I could see audience members across from me, like old souls I might meet someday. Garcia Parnell transported us, along with sound designer Dante Green, to a dance floor in Brooklyn, the place where souls meet beyond this plane, and an aquarium with an octopus learning to converse.
The AI question became the overarching conflict of the evening as Sy caught a news program about an insidious program involving Nimbus (think of Nimbus as this world’s Apple or Amazon), the company that runs all of their lives and who Theo works for, as does their down-the-hall neighbor Leif (the quietly fascinating Michael Adrian Burgos), and how it’s utilizing personal advertising methods by using people to advertise directly to each other. But don’t ask about it, because again, as Leif puts it, it’s akin to violence because who wants to talk about work?
The rest of the play deals with the truths of who we are in public and in private, the lengths we go as humans just to stay afloat in a deeply capitalistic world that would rather extract any and all resources from everything rather than just care for each other, and the involvement of technology in all of that and if we can really have a true human interaction if we’re just trying to survive. There’s a deeply unsettling scene when the AI voice assistant becomes corporeal (deftly handled by Jetta Juriansz, giving us the best detached iPad kid stare, but somehow keeping us all enthralled) and we are confronted with what we would do just to survive in this world.
Leaving the theatre with deep thoughts and considerations, this play is going to sit with me for a while. I love when I can leave a space with questions and hopes and fears and a determination to make a better future for myself and my community.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Trey Radu-Blackburn
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on October 30, 2026. All rights reserved.