Eight Friends of Saul assemble in a dingy church basement for their regular support group meeting. Phones locked away, pamphlets dispersed, each one prepares to share something of their struggles. Each is haunted by the same monster: but is it the internet, their own minds, or both?
Octet is an exploration of how humans and technology have become intimately entangled. This play doesn’t vilify the internet or absolve its audience of their sins—we’d have to head upstairs for that kind of ceremony. Instead, creator Dave Malloy takes us on a journey that raises more questions than it answers. How did we get here? What do we need? Who are we becoming? What do we believe in? The answers are unique to each person in the room, but this show invites us to join in analog contemplation while we seek them together.
I invite you to listen to Dave’s lyrics for a linguistic ebb and flow between nature and technology. The internet language paints landscapes: refresh, feed, surf. The language between people is coded with clicks, LOLs, and memes. The music itself often sounds ancient, drawing from traditions such as chamber music and Mongolian throat singing, while the lyrics reference modern creations like Candy Crush and Tinder. This juxtaposition blurs the lines between what is natural and what is constructed. It evokes the infinite possibilities of the internet, but also of storytelling. Instead of treating this period of time as if it has been lost in the endless scroll, Octet captures the things that are keeping us up at night, right here and now. As one of the characters sings, “when we say ‘in real life’ this is a lie to protect us. It is all real. It is all real life.”
And so our characters gather to process and examine how they are spending their lives. Echo chambers, confirmation bias, neuroplasticity, and dopamine desensitization swirl in their minds. Their addictions waver between recreational, financial, social, sexual, and informational. The internet feeds the worst parts of them, but it reveals what they need from life. They have no way to unplug the machine, but they can take what they’ve learned and become who they need. “Everything and nothing might be real, so I’ll not waste any more of my weird and precious time arguing the nonsense of the wheel.”