Privacy Settings: A Promethean Tale

What would you do if you had to choose between privacy and security? Who holds the master key to open the back door to your private life? Hackers and lawyers, government agencies and law enforcement, data miners and marketing executives, identity thieves and credit bureaus–all are interested in who you are, what you reveal, and what you believe is secure.

Privacy Settings: A Promethean Tale is an ensemble-devised interpretation of the Ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus and based loosely on the actions and punishments of contemporary whistle-blowers, advocates for digital privacy rights and perversions of American civil liberties. Privacy Settings offers a “surveillance fun house” with opportunities for unique interactive experiences.

Conceived and directed by VORTEX Associate Artistic Director, Heather Barfield with a robust cast of agent-performers. Lighting Design by Patrick Anthony, Set Design by Ann-Marie Gordon, Costumes by Pam Fletcher Friday. Sound Design by Chad Salvata.  Video Design by Sergio R. Samayoa. Stage Management by Tamara L. Farley.

We live with black boxes attached to our hips as 21st-century technology and human dignity collide. Data perpetually emits our habits and desires as bits and bytes are hoarded in top-secret shelters. Surpassing the foreboding fictions of “Big Brother” and “Skynet,” we are firmly planted in the era of information overdrive. In June 2013, notorious whistle-blower Edward Snowden exposed what some may have suspected all along: “They” are watching you.

Privacy Settings: A Promethean Tale is funded and supported in part by VORTEX Repertory Company, a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts, and by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.

www.vortexrep.org