I’ve Always Wanted to Become Everyone

It is 2046 in New Beirut. Four billion people wear a Brain-Computer Interface, the most widely adopted technology in human history. On August 4th, a handful of wearers begin to glitch: switching personas suddenly, involuntarily, cycling through identities like a bad radio signal. They are quarantined. A hunt for Patient Zero begins.

I’ve Always Wanted to Become Everyone follows Omar, the CEO and creator of the BCI, who is also contaminated. Over the course of an hour, Omar glitches into a series of personas: a service artist who drops everything when called, a sleep artist who lets unconsciousness consume his waking life, a bodybuilder whose exertion becomes a new grammar, a tech visionary pitching a grief-healing operating system, an arsonist setting fire to the world’s agricultural fields.

One performer on stage. Prerecorded witnesses, reporters, and experts on screen, trying to explain what is happening to him. English, French, Lebanese Arabic, and Spanish circulate as subtitles. The play alternates between live body and projected face, between Omar’s incoherence and the world’s attempt to narrate him.

Investigators discover something unexpected. The glitchers share a common anomaly: a yellow mold growing between their BCI devices and their brains. Physarum polycephalum. The same slime mold that, in laboratories, solves mazes without a brain, without a nervous system, by sheer expansion. Not a malfunction. Not a parasite. Something closer to an author.

A philosopher on French television puts it plainly: “This is not a contagion. It’s a permission. What you call the glitch is the refusal to remain singular. And that refusal is contagious. Not like a virus. Like a desire.”

The play was developed during the Experiments in Digital Storytelling residency at CultureHub LA and premiered there on April 25th, 2026. It is the first long-form work in a practice I have started calling algorithmic theater, where the dramaturgy is held together by code, projection, and the slow logic of a non-human author. You’ve always wanted to become everyone. And now you will be.