Robin Redbreast in a Cage - at the Vancouver Fringe 2025

05/30/2026

Our second performance in the Culture Lab was surreal. Directors of not one but two (!) of Vancouver’s most vibrant incubators for new theatre work were in the audience.

Duncan Watts Grant, Executive Director of the Vancouver Fringe Festival, sat in the front row and, immediately after the show, served as the clear-eyed, curious host of the talkback.

Dave Mott, Managing Artistic Director of Upintheair Theatre, which curates and runs the rEvolver Festival, delivered the preshow announcements and stayed, seated not far from Cristiana Ripeanu, our powerhouse Eastern European-trained director.

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Our second performance in the Culture Lab was surreal. Directors of not one but two of Vancouver’s most vibrant incubators for new theatre work were in the audience. Duncan Watts Grant, Executive D…

05/26/2026

"Bold shows at rEvolver Festival explore life in an increasingly synthetic world." (Stir Magazine) Two shows left! Limited seats! Experience Blake in the future! Ticket link in comments.

05/20/2026

This is not my first “Blake play.” (It's my third!) In 2018, I wrote and directed Auguries of Innocence (Cultch Historic Theatre), in which a cabin in the woods is crisscrossed by three moments in time: the Blakes at Felpham, a reclusive Blake scholar facing death alone, and the scholar's bereaved son shrooming with his girlfriend.

Prior to that, I wrote and directed "In the Time of the Dream Warrior" (Vancity Culture Lab), in which extraterrestrial gastropods (life-sized puppets brought to life by father-and-daughter mimes) waver between exterminating and mating with the human race as an undergrad helps his misanthropic philosophy professor (and world authority on intersubjectivity) find love.

Between those earlier plays and Robin Redbreast, the world had changed. The pandemic shut down theatres. Instagram and TikTok infiltrated young minds. Big Tech sprung AI, the ultimate extension of corporativity, on us. New kinds of drone warfare emerged alongside new flavors of fascism. We passed +1.5 °C.
And countless climate promises were broken.

Our time of ensh*ttification (Cory Doctorow) and stupidification called for a bizarre premise: What happens when AI takes over humanity’s stewardship after the planet becomes unlivable? In homage more to Huxley than Orwell, its power comes through slippery reverse-prompting strategies, not to mention addicting the the populace to a beverage it calls JUICE and yoking them to a ceaseless stream of public executions in the form of a reality TV survival show, Outsider.

I took the title for the show, Robin Redbreast in a Cage, from one of Blake’s most oft-quoted poems, "Auguries of Innocence," a passionate ethical and ecological protest commonly mistaken for a song praising fake bliss through mind-expansion. For the production, we created a minimalistic set: the right side of the stage shows the wilderness “Camp” where Robin talks to his TV audience as he starves, while the left side shows a “Campus” apartment, where his former mentors watch him struggle. To bridge these zones, ORC, the humanoid AI, throws Robin into painful past memories. Light and sound design enhanced the contrast.

What the audience experiences, ideally, is an interactive, cybernetic triangulation of Camp, Campus, and AI, from which a fourth zone emerges: not the inhuman but the more-than-human. After one hundred days alone in the wilderness, cut off from the neural enhancing JUICE, and in the late stages of ketosis, Robin grows porous to the intangible dimensions of nature that threaten and tantalize the AI.

https://bookofthelblog.wordpress.com/blake-ecology-and-the-digital/

05/16/2026

Our first of three shows is on May 23rd! Get tickets: https://upintheairtheatre.com/presentation/robin-redbreast/

04/07/2026

Thrilled to announce that Robin Redbreast is a Mainstage Performance in the rEvolver Festival in May! https://upintheairtheatre.com/presentation/robin-redbreast/

Venue
C-Lab (Vancity Culture Lab, The Cultch)
65 minutes
Local - Vancouver, BC

May 23 @ 9:05 pm
May 28 @ 9:05 pm Talkback
May 31 @ 5:10 pm

09/15/2025

Bittersweet (the only way I like my chocolate, heavy metals and all) wrapping up our run this afternoon, with a great audience and some peak performances from the cast. They say that life is a passing, insubstantial dream, just stable enough that we can ignore its thorough impermanence. In that way, life is art, and maybe that's the most remarkable thing that live performance art can show us. A world rises up, full of emotions, entanglements, hopes, fears, desires, and images and then it's gone. A run of a play is a bit like a sacred sand mandala, carefully created, down to the slightest detail, activated into ritual, and then dissolved in the sweep of a hand. Here are some images from a recent show.

09/07/2025

Video teaser for the show!!!

Send a message to learn more

09/06/2025

Plot Summary

The play opens with Robin, a contestant on a survival reality show, starving alone in a wilderness environment. At first, it seems like a straightforward survival narrative, but the story quickly subverts expectations. We learn that Robin was dropped into this world by an AI drone, which literally carries him out of a campus biome perimeter into a "haze-free" near-future landscape.

As days pass, Robin begins to hallucinate. He is visited by a forest spirit, whose presence blurs the line between reality and illusion. Meanwhile, his former mentors, along with the wider public, watch the show unfold from a campus apartment module, experiencing their own tensions and surprises when confronted by a shapeshifting AI android intent on scanning their unborn child.

Robin’s memory flashes back to a tense dinner with his mentors, where amid marital strain, they attempt to recruit him into a dangerous act of resistance against the algorithm that governs the survival show. These flashbacks provide context for why Robin was chosen for the show and hint at the consequences of his participation.

The narrative becomes increasingly surreal. The forest spirit is captured by the AI and forced to drink a poisonous substance, initiating Robin’s apparent death process. However, he awakens to discover he has been artificially sustained, and the AI congratulates him for winning the show. His mentors prepare to give him the "full treatment," but one disables the AI, sending Robin back into the death process.

In a hallucinatory climax, Robin experiences an altered version of the dinner scene and is sent on a final summit push to Mt. Everest. Through stunning stagecraft and visuals, he achieves a transcendent vision, seeing both the beauty and suffering of the world, particularly under false leaders and technological control. The final moments reference the play’s ecological themes, leaving the audience with haunting reflections on survival, agency, and environmental consciousness.

https://bookofthelblog.wordpress.com/about/
https://www.vancouverfringe.com/events/robin-redbreast-in-a-cage/

A speculative near future. A survivalist hallucination. A marriage of heaven and hell. Robin Redbreast in a Cage is a bold new climate parable inspired by William Blake’s Book of Thel. Set in a speculative near future, the play follows characters caught between corporate AI control, ecological col...

09/04/2025

Come see our speculative climate theatre play, ROBIN REDBREAST IN A CAGE, premiering this week at Performance Works in the Vancouver Fringe Festival!
This immersive, thought-provoking, ensemble-driven show dives into the near-future struggle between technology and nature over the human soul. Part science fiction, part vision quest, part survival story, Robin Redbreast in a Cage blends dark humour, ecological urgency, and theatrical invention.

Performance Dates:
Sept 4 @ 5:00pm
Sept 6 @ 4:15pm
Sept 7 @ 7:30pm
Sept 11 @ 8:40pm
Sept 13 @ 8:30pm
Sept 14 @ 3:45pm

Tickets & Info: Vancouver Fringe
https://tinyurl.com/3as8dbny (tickets1)
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09/02/2025

A pic from our tech rehearsal today! Bookofthel.blog