Imagine you are at a party of maybe 50 people, seated cozily on a couch somewhere, watching the most charismatic person in the room hold court.
You’re listening, you’re laughing, you’re letting yourself be moved by their tales of bad sex and plane crashes, aging parents and trips to Greece. The person speaking is so funny and engaging, so confident in their physicality and self-deprecating humor, that you don’t care that they’re the only one talking. In fact, their stories are so well-paced and hit on such universal themes that certain beats inspire responses from the audience (“Here here!” or sympathetic “Noooo!”s can be heard) and in the swirl of this dialogue you feel the ancient thrum of humanity, the magic of oration, the art of public honesty.
Now imagine that the speaker, at the height of their storytelling, suddenly goes on their phone.
That is the sort of anticlimax one can expect from the otherwise funny and engaging one-man show Before I Forget, performed by Adam Strauss and directed by Jonathan Libman, which premiered last Saturday to a modest crowd at The Marsh’s black box theater at 1062 Valencia St.
Over 90 minutes, Strauss leads the audience through a memoiristic journey that deals with a complicated romance, his father’s decline into dementia, and the possibility of his own genetic predisposition to the condition, culminating in what the show’s marketing bills as “a live AI therapy session” with ChatGPT.
What this looks like on stage is Strauss — who has spent the last 80 minutes or so doing stand-up storytelling and at this point in the performance has worked himself up into a panic over whether to open his genetic test results — grabs a chair, stool, and a Dell laptop that have been waiting at the back of the otherwise bare stage. He places the laptop on the stool and opens it; nearly simultaneously (there were some brief technical difficulties), his screen is projected on the wall behind him. For the first time in the show, he stops talking, and we watch him go through a realistic sequence of websites that one might visit when stressed out and alone: Reddit, Facebook, and, finally, ChatGPT.
But unlike Reddit and Facebook, which appear to be logged into Strauss’s real accounts, it’s clear that the “ChatGPT” site is a pre-programmed mock up made by Strauss and his director Jonathan Libman; not only does Strauss’s typing rhythm not match up to what the audience sees on the projection, but the play chatbot’s tone is drier and more antagonistic — think, Hal 9000 — than the typical sycophancy OpenAI users know and love.
Putting ChatGPT onto the stage is an intriguing experiment, if not the stuff of compelling drama. OpenAI’s flagship product receives 2.5 billion prompts from users daily, including from Strauss, who told me he occasionally uses ChatGPT for on-demand therapy.
“I believe it was Jonathan [Libman]’s idea initially to incorporate this on stage,” Strauss told me the week before the play debuted. “The fact that you have a character who is unpredictable, has tremendous capabilities, and has unclear agendas makes for a lot of dramatic possibilities.”
That unpredictability, though, proved unworkable on stage. After the show, Strauss confirmed that much of what audiences saw was preprogrammed. He and Libman had tried to use the real ChatGPT 5.1 at Friday’s soft opening, he told me, but 5.1 “can’t give medical advice, so it kept stonewalling.” He also tried to tell it beforehand that this was for a show, but “it would actually ham it up” too much, adding a new one to W.C. Fields’s dictum to “never work with children or animals.”
The more fundamental problem, of course, is that watching someone be online is simply not that interesting. Without cinematography, editing, and a score to help the audience feel what the character is feeling, the audience is left to watch someone quietly fall into an anxious habit, more akin to watching someone pick a hangnail than experience a cathartic psychotherapy session. In our era of doomscrolling and social isolation, realism can be boring.
“It was the least engaging part of the show for me,” said audience member David Baxter, a former tech operations manager from Berkeley. “AI is getting better, but it’s still just glorified pattern matching.”
Other audience members were more inspired by the novelty. “I thought it was great,” said Thea Gray, a physicist sitting behind me. She and her companion, Pearl Tesler, both have mothers who have dealt with dementia, so they found the depiction of agonizing over genetic predispositions poignant. “It’s like, you want to know, but you can’t ever really know,” said Tesler. “And the way they incorporated AI was also really appropriate for this audience. It’s interesting to those of us who hold all that at arm’s length.”
The play ends on a morally ambiguous note. After Strauss tells his ailing father about his interactions with the chatbot, his father replies: “Don’t talk to that thing.” Are we supposed to assume this insight is offered in a rare moment of clarity? Or a confused response to a description of newfangled technology? Considering this is a play about cognitive decline that does not address the cognitive effects of AI use, Before I Forget offers little guidance for how to interpret this final line.
Still, the show got a standing ovation, and I actually left The Marsh that night in a great mood. Despite the deflating effect that the screentime scene had on its audience, the rest of the show was captivating and refreshingly un-techy. As one audience member put it, “To watch one human be brave enough to stand in front of fifty people and do all that? That’s what brings me back.”
