DEINDE Reviews

2012 Production by Flux Theatre Ensemble Reviews

“In DEINDE, Schulenburg explores technology, relationships, that old standby hubris, and, oh yeah, the meaning of life. That’s a lot to cover in a two-act play, and he does it with humor, compassion, and some gorgeous dialogue.”
-Wendy Caster, Show Showdown

“Schulenburg has created a socially relevant cautionary tale about the uses and abuses of technology. And in saddling his message to a host of intriguing characters and a smart story, he comes to praise its possibilities, not bury them. Imagine that.”
-Doug Strassler, New York Press

“DEINDE explores these themes through the time-honored tropes of artificial intelligence and the terrors of unbridled tech, matched with clever dialogue and soul-searching ruminations on life and love. Produced in our time of iPhones and SIRI, DEINDE feels prescient, as well as connected to science fiction’s past.”
-Kaila Hale-Stern, io9

“The play, which is put on by Flux Theatre Ensemble, is engaging for its humor, its rich characters and the actors who bring them to life, and for the complex and chilling inquiries into how we define being human as technology becomes an increasingly prevalent force in our lives.”
-Matthew Taylor, BORO Magazine

“DEINDE is one of the smartest, sharpest, and most important new plays of the theatre season. This is the kind of work that the deep-pocketed nonprofit institutions that dominate our theatre ought to be looking for and mounting, and I’m proud to be calling attention to it any way that I can.”
-Martin Denton, nytheatre.com

“…what can be done in the onslaught of inevitable progress? When does beneficial crossover into harmful? As the characters sang, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” the meaning in the context of Schulenburg’s inquiry settled into more deeply layered nuances. Humanity, like the stalwart spider, will get washed away time and time again and yet will always go back climbing up the water spout, hoping, perhaps this time, to get to the top.”
-Jen Gunnels, The New York Review of Science Fiction

“Deinde provokes conversation at every turn: Unlike other cautionary tales about the technological singularity, DEINDE the machine never becomes self-aware like the Terminator franchise’s feared Skynet system. The singularity is us, merged into one being suddenly painfully aware of humanity’s failings and zealously committed to knitting us together into some deus ex machina.”
-Natalie Zutter, Tor

“A complex and engaging new play that satisfies both brain hemispheres. Science nerds, your time at the theatre has arrived, and August Schulenburg will be your Captain Kirk.”
-Molly Marinik, Theatre is Easy

“…take it from me, go see Deinde in the weekend that you have left, it’s a genuine Science Fiction Play, and it’s cracking good, and it might just be the beginning of what Flux and its Secret Theatre Fellows are doing to make theatre lively and meaningful and not about what commercial Theatre tries unsuccessfully to be about.”
-Larry Kunofsky, New York Theater Review

“August Schulenberg’s dazzling play DEINDE is not a sci-fi play.  It is a sci-IF play: switch those two small, almost insignificant letters around in the equation and you get an infinite set of new possibilities. And this is what is at the heart of DEINDE, a play I found revolutionary in its ability to look back while taking a humongous but reasonable leap forward.”
-Montserrat Mendez, Indie Theater Now

“DEINDE will feel warmly familiar to fans of transhuman science fiction, but rather than a plod down a well-tread road, it’s a deep examination of these issues that often focuses on new concepts within this sub-genre.”
-Charles Battersby, Theater for Nerds