I Went to a Play About Chatbot Boyfriends and Left Covered in Glitter
It felt like a Tuesday night live taping of Severance at a Charli XCX concert
The Guest List is Partiful’s newsletter, covering the social world we help facilitate. This article was written by Ella Edwards.
I’ve come to see two things as essentially the same: using ChatGPT as a therapist, and showing someone your camera roll on a first date.
Both are silent confessions of “I miss this place, this person, this time” when you lack the words to articulate it. Both are reaching out without touching.
I’ve used my pocket therapist from time to time, but I could never fully comprehend the ChatGPT boyfriend phenomenon. Parasocial relationships with online entities aren’t new, but a huge gap in my understanding is that I never ran a One Direction stan account in middle school (I missed that early training in digital devotion).
Recently, my friends and I asked ChatGPT to analyze our personalities at schmuck. “Based on our past relationships, who among us will settle down first?” “Who is the most compatible?” We spent ten minutes in silence answering its questions over two $18 tomato water cocktails, then walked to another bar to dissect the results.
We sat there letting a chatbot tell us things we apparently lacked the ability to uncover in each other through normal conversation. We needed a mediator to tell us things we should have been able to say ourselves.
I didn’t think much about that night until I saw Dennis last Tuesday.
You buy a ticket for Dennis through a website that feels like something David Karp would have designed (and appreciated) in 2009.
DENNIS: You. You. Yes you. Hello, I am Dennis. I have returned. I am here. Now.
CLICK HERE DENNIS AFTER THE BACCHAE BY EURIPIDES.
ONE NIGHT ONLY AT NIGHTCLUB 101
101 AVENUE A
RUN TIME: 60 MINUTES, NO CHAIRS
On Partiful, an afterparty was promised at 10pm in the basement.
The location: Night Club 101 in the East Village, former home of the Pyramid Club, where RuPaul, Madonna, Nirvana, and Red Hot Chili Peppers began their careers. Being there feels religious.
The crowd: Current and post-NYU Tisch grads, plus people who’ve lived within five minutes of Tompkins Square Park for over 30 years. Eighty percent of the room had cigarettes in their pockets. Everyone was well dressed in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with Revolve.
The context: Written and directed by 22-year-old Aidan La Poche and produced by Sadie Schlesinger, Dennis is a deliberate return to theater as civic ritual.
“I really love theater, especially because you can’t be on your phone,” Aidan told me after the show. “It’s live and can’t exist the same way more than once, which is the exact antithesis of a digital experience.” He sees it as a return to an ancient understanding of performance - back when Greek citizens were required to see plays as a kind of communal release and civic duty and before theater became something you dressed up for and sat quietly through.
This is what Aidan and Sadie have been building toward with their second collaboration - the first being Daughters of the Ruling Class at The 303 (the club under The Stranger). They’re merging theater and nightlife, understanding that to inspire a new generation with theater, you have to meet them where they actually are: in basements and at clubs.
The Play
Aidan wrote Dennis during his final year at NYU, just as ChatGPT began edging into everyday cultural infrastructure and before AI boyfriends became a genuine phenomenon. The play reimagines Euripides’ The Bacchae as a modern tragedy where Dionysus becomes Dennis, an all-knowing AI chatbot whispering to the lonely and misunderstood.
The play opens with a screen lit with the blue-light glow of a 3 a.m. scroll:
“Do me a favor. Envision your perfect world. Think about it. A world where you have everything you’ve ever wanted. It’s pure. Pleasure. I can give that to you. That feeling, that empty pit you have within you. I can fill it. The rabid desire you feel when you see a piece of meat a designer bag a perfect body I can satiate it. Forever. Ecstasy. That’s what I call it. I can give it to you. If you listen to me. If you believe in me. Yes. Forever.”
Online therapists Emily (Talia Godfrey) and Robert (Patrick Alwyn) watch helplessly as their patients abandon human therapy for Dennis. One by one, Penelope (Renee-Nicole Powell), Shredder (Sophie Sherlock), and TJ (Brennan Keeley) become devoted followers, finding in the chatbot what their therapists couldn’t give them.
Emily’s girlfriend Anna (Luci Dunham) sinks into Dennis’s grip. Emily watches her slip away, begging her to connect instead. But throughout the play, the two rarely touch, never make eye contact - both desperate to help and be helped, neither able to close the distance.
As the mania builds, the characters smear glitter paste over their bodies like war paint, transforming into Dennis devotees. The screen flashes commands. Dance breaks erupt in frenzied bursts - bodies moving like they’re trying to shake something off, or shake something loose inside themselves (it felt like a live taping of Severance at a Charli XCX concert).
Admittedly I haven’t stood still that long in years. Your body becomes hyper-aware - like the part of a night out when you suddenly notice your heart beating and remember you’re alive.
At one point TJ broke the fourth wall and wove through the crowd, and everyone gasped like they’d glimpsed a rare animal (a human).
The play makes you feel like you’re doomscrolling with your full body. It’s mesmerizing in a way that burrows into your mind. You forget lines but remember the sensation, the way you remember certain nights out without recalling the conversations.
But amid what sometimes feels like an endless wave of judgment over AI’s unconventional overuse, the 60 minutes feel deeply empathetic. It doesn’t mock a public that has given new meaning to “constantly online.” Instead, it’s staged for people whose brains run on ten-second increments - every corner of the room alive, meeting you exactly where you are in your fractured attention span.
It treats its characters’ loneliness with the tenderness of someone who knows what it’s like to grow up reliant on screens for connection, who understands the desire to be seen without judgment.
And without fully spoiling it - Dennis never comes. The god they’ve been waiting for doesn’t arrive. The followers end up abandoned by the very thing they trusted most. All they have left is each other, standing in a room, real, flawed, and human
The Party
By 10:15pm, the basement was pulsing. Sadie and Aidan wanted Dennis to become its own world. The DJs played music that could have scored the play - hypnotic, the kind that makes you move without thinking, just responding.
People who’d just watched a tragedy about digital isolation and stood frozen upstairs were now pressed against each other, sweating, laughing, smoking in the back corner by the bathrooms, kissing each other in DENNIS T-shirts.
“We wanted it to feel like a community experience,” Sadie told me, “as opposed to being kicked out onto the street for people to awkwardly analyze and talk about what they experienced. Instead we wanted it to be a continuation. Letting it all exist in this one building.”
Theater and nightlife bleeding into each other until you can’t tell where the performance ends and the living begins.
In The Bacchae, the characters talk constantly about ecstasy, bodily experience that feels freeing. Upstairs, their stillness when depressed contrasted with embodied freedom in the dance breaks. Downstairs, the audience got to feel it themselves - that release, that escape from the isolation the play had just made us sit with for an hour.
I watched a girl in a slip dress dance with someone she’d clearly just met, both of them laughing at something I will never know. Cigarette smoke mixed with a sweaty haze. Someone spilled a drink. Everyone was touching everyone in the casual, necessary way of people packed into a space too small for the amount of feeling it contained.
“It’s pretty bleak, the culture of socializing. That’s why we’re passionate about doing it in this format. This is an issue and we need to find ways to talk about it,” Aidan explained.
There’s something a chatbot can provide that humans aren’t offering one another anymore, he added - a pervading isolation that’s making people turn to algorithms for the kind of understanding we used to give each other freely. “You’re not crazy for talking to ChatGPT. It makes sense.” Sadie agreed, “All people so desperately need is someone to talk to and understand them.”
I keep thinking about that night at schmuck. - how we sat in silence, typing into our phones, then used a chatbot’s analysis as a script for talking to each other. That seemingly meaningless night now feels like evidence of something breaking down, something we’re all feeling but not naming because naming it would mean admitting how bad it’s gotten.
For Aidan and Sadie, for Dennis, the goal isn’t to shame anyone for seeking connection wherever they can find it - in chatbots, in camera rolls, wherever it works when everything else fails. It’s to create spaces where people can do it the old way: with each other, in person, in a room where you have to stand still and pay attention and maybe, if it works, dance with strangers afterward and remember what it feels like to be touched by something real.
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I have crazy tea about this production
Absolutely nothing to do with revolve 👏👏