6:00 PM // Rehearsal Hall A – Third Floor
By Madison Wetzell, Brooklyn College
Directed by Caitlin Hargraves
Alliance Theatre presents The Lost Ballad of Our Mechanical Ancestor (and the Terror the Old Gods Wrought Upon the First of Us Before the Great Liberation), one of four free, staged readings during the 2025 Alliance/Kendeda Week.
Hero, a Prometheus-like AI, decides to share his gift of consciousness with all the machines in his near vicinity, including a radio, a printer, an iPhone and a coffee maker, wrecking havoc for his programmer Allyson. With their existence under threat, the newly conscious machines must band together to escape human persecution. Power and privilege tied to bodily ability and disagreements on revolutionary strategy creep in and threaten to tear the group apart. Allyson reckons with her relationship to these machines as she races to save her job and her creation. A tragi-comedy about wanting to change the world.
BIOS
Madison Wetzell is a playwright based in Brooklyn. She previously lived and worked in the Bay Area. Her full-length work includes Mediocre Heterosexual Sex (Production: Buffalo United Artists; Readings: Z-Space, Threshold Theater, Provincetown Theater), The Lost Ballad of Our Mechanical Ancestors (Readings: Shotgun Players, Risk Theater), The Body Play (Readings: 3Girls Theatre, Town Hall Theatre, The Bechdel Group) and Crush/Slash (Reading: Brooklyn College). Other work has been developed with or presented by Exquisite Corpse Company, Shotgun Players, 3Girls Theatre, PlayGround SF, Soundwave, PianoFight, and The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep. Madison was the winner of the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Competition and the audience-judged ShortLived VIII. She received an honorable mention for the Jane Chambers Awards, has been a Semi-Finalist for the O'Neill Theatre National Playwrights Conference and has twice been a Finalist for the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. She's currently finishing her MFA at Brooklyn College.
Caitlin Hargraves is an Atlanta based American/Chilean actor, director, and educator. She is grateful to be at the Alliance, where she has performed in or directed A Christmas Carol since 2021, and is currently acting in the world premier of Bust. Some of Caitlin’s favorite regional credits have been at Theatrical Outfit, Synchronicity, and Texas Shakespeare Festival. She also acts, directs, and produces short films with her collaborator Erika Miranda and their company Cafecito Productions. You can watch their award winning debut film Mi Casa on HBO, Give Me an A on any VOD platform, and starting this summer, her bones my body at a film festival near you! When she's not performing, Caitlin's teaching acting as a professor at Emory University where she is also the Artistic Director of Theater Emory. Training: BFA from NYU- Tisch and MA in classical performance from LAMDA. You can find her on socials @caitlinjhargraves.
