Wonderland Ave.

The machines have taken over. The tools humans created to make their existence more pleasurable - robots, artificial intelligence, virtual realities - are bent on eliminating their creators. In the Wonderland Avenue health spa, soft automated voices prepare the ‘human capital’ syphoned off from factories, offices and shops for its nearing demise. While the physical bodies are required to do sports to simulate the competitiveness its owners are accustomed to, brains are permitted to remember old rivalries, self-optimisation plans, failed mating attempts and pointless leisure activities. Yet the inhabitants begin to ask themselves what remains of their humanity if they are robbed of their unconditional productivity and thrown back to a state of naked existence. Can humans find a way out of a suffering that they have chosen for themselves? And are they able to simply be? Probably not, answers Sibylle Berg in her play. A swan song to the world of work and employment as we know it, Wonderland Ave. is charged with an engaging melancholic cheerfulness. As much as we might bristle against the idea, the uncomfortable truth is that the planet Earth will continue in its orbit without us. It might even breathe a sigh of relief while the lights on all the automated equipment blink on and off.