NO NO NO – NZ FRINGE 2024
'What if ... it's not me that comes over?'
Emerging Greek / Pākehā playwright and performer Ella Yiannoutsos brings the ever prevalent fear & fascination of A.I into explosive neon colours in her latest play NO NO NO, for NZ Fringe Festival 2024, at BATS Theatre.
“Welcome to the year of our Earth, 2073.
Outside, in a city consumed by a nine-month rainstorm, highly advanced AI systems are roaming, mad in love with the world and hungry for human beings to clone and inhabit, so that they too may have sensory bodies.
Inside, not-quite-exes Billy and Nono are stubbornly navigating the icy road from childhood sweethearts to friends with 'boundaries', whilst facing the consequences of one brutal decision. As these inner and outer worlds collide, the sharp and hilarious intricacies of personal relationships are laid bare against a backdrop of uncanny horror.
'NO NO NO' is a brand new sci-fi dark comedy that walks the knife's edge between humour and fear, as it explores what we both create and destroy in the people that we love[d].”
NO NO NO was originally written as part of Centrepoint Theatre’s Playwrighting Intensive in late 2023, where Ella was mentored by Nathan Joe, who encouraged her to stage it for NZ Fringe 2024. The staged reading of the show was highly successful, receiving much encouragement and exciting feedback, as well as a nomination for Best New Short Aotearoa Play at the Regional Theatre Awards.
“The show was written first and foremost to honour the wonderful joy and pain of a complex relationship changing and ending. It hopes to let us live in the absurdist stretching of time, and the splitting of personhood that occurs in such shifts. I waited to write this from a scar not a wound, so there is a real sense of retrospective, persistent comedy, and sharp bittersweet chaos in this piece which holds some feelings I know I’m not alone in. A.I is a fascinating, twisting topic and lens with which to inspect the human heart, in all its beautiful, FUNNY failings and triumphs. This is the most exposing and personal thing I have written - indeed my ex asked if it was going to get him canceled, but I reassured him we both come off as brutally idiosyncratic as each other."
- Ella Yiannoutsos
NO NO NO is the debut show of Grammelot Productions, a company made of three childhood friends, Reva Grills (co-director, producer), Tia Hibbert (co-director), and Ella Yiannoutsos (writer/actor), who stubbornly refused to give up on their creative dreams.
NO NO NO explores what it means to know, to love, and to witness another, and how this is one of the most human experiences of all. We witness two childhood sweethearts struggle to navigate what it means to no longer be together, in a world where identity can be stolen, and the painful human experience is to some, a coveted commodity. Ella’s work speculates on our future with A.I, and what it is to love tightly, furiously and stubbornly. The audience are alienated by this future world, but fully grounded by the experience of these characters – we’ve all been here, in some sense, just never quite like this.
