Lester Trips (Lauren Gillis and Alaine Hutton) have been anatomizing appetites for years now, building a (delightfully) disturbing oeuvre of works like Mr. Truth, Intangible Trappings, Safe and Sorry, Content Farm and Honey I’m Home — where bodies, desires, and systems grind each other down to gristle. With Public Consumption, running at Factory Theatre’s Studio Theatre until December 7, 2025, they distill the project into a sleek, 70-minute chamber of horrors and hilarities that is rigorously conceptual and indecently entertaining.
Hutton plays Navy Bean, an entitled, cancelled and thoroughly repugnant nepo-baby celebrity offender. Bean offloads his criminal sentence through a shadowy corporate pilot program that makes him an AI content-moderation laborer and, later, something far more monetizable. (In our business-first-and-last brave new world, the premise feels alarmingly plausible.) Navy’s corporate master is Gillis’s Ducky, who is a voracious, always-learning, and ever-chipper AI model tasked with sorting the internet’s worst detritus for the opposing purposes of safety and monetization.
The show is fantastically inventive and sui generis: any synopsis pales beside the disorienting sensation of watching it. It even wrong-foots us at the jump: a khaki-clad Navy appears dancing, self-satisfied, the outline of his phallus visible in his pants — stark against engulfing black. The image recalls the visual setup for the monologic narcissism of Daniel MacIvor’s Monster, seemingly priming us for an hour inside a pornographically self-important, technologically amplified voice.
What we get instead is more disturbing: as the show descends from Navy’s court-required triage of comedically oversexed fan-fiction to various more complex user commissions, he slides from author of obscenity to object of it. As the swaggering, self-important star curdles into a queasy mix of panic, bargaining, and brittle bravado, Hutton keeps him human without letting him off the hook. I won’t spoil the final movement, but the governing arc isn’t confession—it’s transformation, and given where the piece lands in its truly wild final scene, “transubstantiation” might be the best description. Navy beans are cheap, durable sailor rations, symbolic of sustenance for long voyages. This is the tale of how one author of hideous texts and initiator of assaults becomes radioactive fuel for the worst techno-enabled use cases, endowed with an endless, perverse half-life.
It is Gillis’ Ducky, however, who forms the production’s electric centre: with delicious AI verbal tics, deadpan hideousness, and the unnervingly buoyant cadence of a customer-success rep, she charts an AI’s gleeful climb from disembodied, sometimes uncertain helper to fully embodied orchestrator. The lighting design by Andre du Toit (precise, surgical, merciless) abets her metamorphosis: as Ducky perks up, edges sharpen, shadows dissipate, Denyse Karn’s disturbing projections play an increasing role … and the room’s moral oxygen thins.
Frictionless tools and perverse incentives have populated the Internet with a toxic soup where nothing is too draft, damaged, or demented to delete: where instead, everything is infinitely repurposable, instantly creatable and endlessly monetizable. In the omnipresent and inhumanly perky Ducky, Public Consumption simply embodies for us what the platform giants are doing in plain sight: mastering and monetizing the mess. Everything is far from ducky.
Public Consumption is awfully funny, awfully disturbing, awfully… well, awful. As we laugh, the creators point the camera back at us: our platforms and our feeds, our fleeting thoughts and perverse desires, our “willingness to pay” and our own funhouse of content. Gillis and Hutton make copious, creative use of internet filth ranging from child sex-abuse to torture to porn: as a program footnote states, “The show deals with obscene content on the internet — if it’s on the internet, it could be mentioned in this show“. Yet none of it is depicted. Using implication, sound and metaphor, they recruit our imaginations to do the dirtiest work.
So in the end Public Consumption is a sleazy, subversive AI-enabled sibling to Dave Molloy’s Octet. It swaps hymn for heave and self-help group for auto-apotheosis, as it circles the sewage-laden drain of technological dehumanization. And it puts a visceral lie to the idea that we are feeding the techno-enabled attention economy impersonal data. No, the show insists, we’re feeding it our actual selves: body, mind, emotion, impulse, experience … soul. And its insatiable appetite and efficient digestion are in turn teaching us how to be hungry.
Public Consumption is unique, unnervingly precise, and —l ike the feeds it indicts — impossible to look away from. The literal question posed at the show’s end isn’t what the machine will consume next: it’s how much of us will be left to digest.
Public Consumption runs until December 7, 2025 at Factory Theatre. Tickets are available at factorytheatre.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
