Two young women living in Washington, D.C. are horrified to discover that AI-generated explicit content depicting their likenesses is being circulated online-as they rush to discover who is responsible for creating and sharing these deepfakes and why, they contend with the fact that virtually no laws exist to hold the perpetrator responsible.
Tickets here: https://www.thehopetheatre.com/imposed
How did you prepare emotionally to portray a character confronting the violation of seeing her own likeness used in AI-generated explicit imagery?
It’s really difficult! I guess the key is actually being unprepared, because it is such a shocking gut-punch. There’s disbelief, then panic, then the absolute powerlessness of not knowing who is behind this or how to stop it. Obviously you can’t play that all at once, so I just have to breathe into it and let the roller coaster of horror take us where it’s going to take us as these discoveries unfold. I’m lucky to have an incredible scene partner in Josselyn Ryder who is on the ride with me, and our amazing director Hannah Eidinow helped us to unearth how each of our characters’ reactions would be personal and different. We also had the great benefit of collaborating with the writer, Ben Hatt, and his excellent insight really helped.
What aspects of Imposed felt most urgent or personally resonant to you as you explored its themes of accountability and digital harm?
I think the biggest thing for me was realizing just how little regulation and accountability there is around deepfaking. There is no such thing as being in control of your image anymore because there is so little regulation around AI-generated content, particularly in the States. The idea that you can be specifically targeted by a community of people online who then proliferate these images and who can’t be held accountable at all is terrifying. And when you do even a little bit of digging into how digital harm is reaching schools, let alone our political system–it’s the Wild West and it’s petrifying.
How did working in such an intimate three-hander format shape your performance and connection with the other actors on stage?
I’m very lucky to be collaborating with two of my best friends, who also happen to be two of the most talented actors I could hope to work with. We have certain aspects of the close friendships between these characters already baked into our dynamic, so it’s nice to draw on some of that for free, but I think it also afforded us a level of trust with each other to then go to some darker places together because of what unfolds over the course of the play. I think the nature of it being just the three of us, set in our apartment where we (should) feel safest, allows the really unguarded human moments to shine through. Ben has written such excellent dynamics–we get to play with how the characters’ interactions shift depending on the pairing, and the audience gets to see us alone onstage and how our secrets change our behavior when we’re not being witnessed.
In what ways do you think theatre uniquely positions audiences to engage with the real-world crises surrounding deepfakes and online safety?
Part of what I love about Ben’s writing in all his work is it centers around a moral question without preaching or providing an easy answer. Our hope is that this play is a jumping off point that stimulates conversation, and ideally real-world change. I think theatre at its best sends an audience off with more questions than answers, and that the conversations continue long after we’ve all left the theatre. Because theatre is live and unfiltered and unedited, I think it’s the most human way of presenting a story (something AI could never truly achieve). In a world so rife with misinformation, Imposed reveals just how damaging deepfakes can be, and I think audiences will feel able to relate to these characters–they could be any of us. Theatre requires us to sit and be present with all that human messiness.
What conversations or reactions are you hoping audiences carry with them after experiencing Imposed?
I hope this play will engender a greater awareness of just how easy it is for the internet to run rampant with next to zero accountability and urge us to consider the danger of these digital tools outpacing our ability to control them. I also hope the play encourages us to engage more deeply with the global rise of toxic masculinity and address the root contributing factors to why there are online communities that do perpetrate these attacks–it’s one thing to address a need for digital safety, but a potentially harder and more important issue to examine the affliction that’s underneath the symptom. I hope people are both appropriately outraged, and keen to interrogate how and why this is happening in the first place. If the audience leaves interrogating its preconceived notions, that’s a success.
How did collaborating with director Hannah Eidinow influence your approach to the character’s psychological journey?
Hannah is so wonderful to work with–she gives us a huge amount of freedom to play, while also having a clear sense of where she’s steering the ship. She encouraged us to have a lot of fun with the beginning so that we would have somewhere to go when the bottom drops out. Because this is the UK premiere of Imposed and we were getting revisions to the draft, Hannah encouraged us to improv in rehearsal and explore pushing the boundaries of where these characters’ minds go; there was a spirit of exploration throughout navigating the discoveries of what happens between these friends in the hopes that all those thoughts would be part of the scene, even if unspoken, and add a richness to the great dialogue Ben has crafted.