In September 2025, Sydney Dramaturgical Company staged the Australian premiere of Matthew Gasda's Doomers across Tom Mann Theatre and Two80 Cabaret in Surry Hills, as part of Sydney Fringe Festival. The two-act corporate psychodrama — set in late 2023, around a fictionalised OpenAI boardroom crisis — was directed by Victoria Lenehan and accompanied by a free public panel on AI and Australia's creative industries featuring Professor Alana Maurushat (Western Sydney University). The production was reviewed in The Scoop and Pulp Magazine.
In September 2025, Sydney Dramaturgical Company staged the Australian premiere of Matthew Gasda's Doomers across two Surry Hills venues as part of Sydney Fringe Festival 2025. The production opened on 1 September at Two80 Cabaret (280 Cleveland Street, Surry Hills) and ran additional performances on 9, 29, and 30 September at the same venue, with a matinee and evening performance at the Tom Mann Theatre at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts (136 Chalmers Street, Surry Hills) on 7 September. Both venues sit on Gadigal Country.
The play was directed by Victoria Lenehan. Its production framing — preserved on the company's Squarespace archive — described the setting as the not-so-distant past — 2023, when the AI takeover was still speculative, not inevitable. Doomers was described as a two-act corporate psychodrama about messianic founders, money cults, and the delusions of control. The script frames its tech company as MindMesh, a fictionalised stand-in for OpenAI as it appeared at the time of the November 2023 board crisis.
Victoria Lenehan's director's statement, preserved in full on the production's archive page, framed the work's tonal challenge directly. On the script:
As a director, I was drawn to how well the script balanced satire with sincerity. Rather than offering a black-and-white moral take, DOOMERS captures the complexity of our moment — the hubris, confusion, and human failure behind the gleaming tech façade.
On the production's tonal range:
Tonally, the play swings between farce and realism. Moments of brutal honesty sit alongside absurd humour and corporate jargon gone rogue. My vision is to strip away the mythos surrounding tech CEOs and innovators, exposing their dysfunctional, almost family-like dynamics. They're no different from the rest of us: flawed, scared, posturing for relevance. In doing so, DOOMERS holds a mirror up to society — not to judge, but to expose and provoke.
On the play's refusal to resolve its central question:
I'm not interested in answering the question of where AI will land in all this — whether it will bring order or accelerate collapse. Instead, I want to live in the discomfort of not knowing. This production doesn't offer certainty. I want to lean into the ambiguity, the speculation — where fear and fascination blur, and where the future remains unresolved.
On the rehearsal process:
What I've loved most about working on DOOMERS is the way we've been able to drop into the world together — not from above, but from within. Rather than directing from the outside, I've found the richest moments come when we're immersed, when we are the doomers. That's when the unexpected happens. Some of my favourite beats weren't written as comedy, but became hilarious through us playing around with it.
The production's full cast, with character framing taken from the company's archive materials:
SETH — played by Ben Blackler. A Sam Altman-esque founder; described in the company's framing as a messianic figure and the sociopathic founder in Anastasia Dale's Pulp Magazine review.
JEFF — played by Bryson Grenfell. A polyamorous senior advisor in midlife crisis. Pulp Magazine singled out Bryson Grenfell as the midlife crisis polyamorist alongside Blackler as the production's strongest performances.
RICHARD — played by Andy Ostojic. A former founder who cashed out and moved to Berlin when he saw where things were headed. One of MindMesh's first investors, now more interested in watching the inevitable tragedy unfold than preventing it. Ostojic described Richard's interiority in the production's cast interviews:
I've gotten to know more of Richard's personalities. I think there are at least four. There's definitely a toddler. There is a sort of Dr. Evil, Montgomery Burns character. There is a valley girl, a mean girl. A sassy queen. He's very blunt as well… he likes to lecture… so I think there's some kind of like 'a dad' but like an unkind dad that doesn't listen.
ELI — played by Apollo Zephyr. An influential AI doom blogger and former MindMesh employee. Zephyr explained his approach:
The writing brings out this goofy, energized side of me, like a crazy hermit on mushrooms. At first, Eli feels like an antagonist, chill and detached because he has no real stakes. But by the end, he's not just butting heads — he's trying to show that it's better to do mushrooms and accept collapse than panic. He's comedic relief, yeah, but it's intentional — he throws himself under the bus to get everyone else out of their seriousness.
HARRIET — played by Sam Goldrick. A board member and former NSA official, played in the production as someone realising that overseeing AI development may be harder than overseeing intelligence agencies. Goldrick framed the political subtext of the role:
It's less about defence itself and more about how politics and power interrelate with technology — especially with its alignment to the private sector and capitalism. That blending of church and state is something we're seeing now in our systems. Harriet's role on the board is about representing humanity — she truly believes she's on the right side of history. But how that plays out also shows the hubris of that belief in many ways.
CHARLIE — played by Richie Clarke. A board member and veteran tech executive, a pragmatist whose determination to find middle ground may be his blind spot. Clarke offered the production's most quoted line on the play's central irony:
I'd say Doomers is a fairly accurate portrayal of corporate life and its limits — the point where reality hits a wall. And we see that all through the play, as new, humorous characters hit that wall too. In the Doomers world, reality is life — and its opposite is corporate. I actually think doomers are optimists. What they imagine is kind of the best-case scenario: yes, the world ends, but convenience has already destroyed our motivation to exist.
MEI — played by Leilani Faasisila. The Scoop's review noted that the warmth of Faasisila's Mei is a front.
ALINA — played by Claude Ivery.
SANJAY — played by Shanel Dilip.
MYRA — played by Sally Williams.
Writer — Matthew Gasda
Director — Victoria Lenehan
Producer — Sydney Dramaturgical Company
Sound Design — Henry Lee (confirmed in the company's 2026 Creative Australia application as continuing as Sound Designer for the 2026–2028 program)
Set Design — Kyla Delacruz (across the Two80 Cabaret and Tom Mann Theatre venues)
Christian Claye Edwards reviewed the production's opening night for The Scoop on 28 August 2025. Edwards framed the play as a very punchy two-act excoriation of greed, human stupidity and hubris. On Lenehan's direction, the review noted the production was quick and cunningly wrought.
Edwards documented the venue split:
The Sydney Dramaturgical Company are splitting performances between the burlesque fun of the Two80 and the spacious Tom Mann Theatre in the semi-grunge of downtown Surry Hills, opposite the Alfred Park at Central.
On the production's central observation about how quickly the play's referents had dated:
What's perhaps most surprising about Doomers is how much the play has aged in only two years. Addled by an appalling few years of war, Trump, Putin, Elon and Everything, the modern (2025) Aussie audience will find it almost impossible to recall an America before D.O.G.E. and an Elon who wasn't coming across as a complete dick.
On the production's accuracy of type:
The personality types who populate Gasda's vision of where human rubber is hitting the AI road are queasily familiar to most of us in 2025. And they all seem to revel in crisis.
The review acknowledged technical difficulties (audio popping out during the opening) while praising the cast's hold on character throughout:
Still, in what we hope is the true spirit of the age, the entire cast remained on point, in character, with nary a Californian accent wavering.
Anastasia Dale reviewed Doomers for Pulp Magazine, the online student publication of the University of Sydney Union, on 3 September 2025. Dale's review opened with a sensory account of the pre-show:
The producer, Aubrey Wang, wears all black. He is named Aubrey in the boy way, like Drake… The mics glow blue on the collars of the actors in the murky pre-show light. A man plays with a pop-it fidget toy talking about his divorce and how much he loves his work, hates his work, lives for his work, dies by the sword.
Dale framed the play's overall register:
Doomers. A cloyingly American tale for our time. I love the sound of Australians doing American accents; the crisp rhoticity, vowels squished at the top of mouths. The feeling of something learned from TV and movies. It is the perfect kind of accent for this play. Artificial, unnatural, contrasting the few actors that keep their Aussie accent.
On the play's structural logic:
The doomers are stilted in that strange tech bro way, unable to understand the implications of even their smallest actions. Their voices and accents clash in soulless conflict. The play operates as an anthological fable. Two different casts pretend to try to deal with the same problem, but really they just want to be the most important person in the room, and desperately need to feel like they have an important, stressful job.
On the production's central thesis:
Doomers provides an astute, at times infuriating, often uncomfortable look at the circlejerks that decide our collective fate. It's what I imagine Succession (2018) is like for the characters who actually work.
Dale singled out the production's strongest performances:
Some actors falter (we can't all be Jeremy Strong) but others shine, particularly Bryson Grenfell as the midlife crisis polyamorist and Ben Blackler as the sociopathic founder. These two illuminate the first half of the show, markedly the stronger act.
On the play's resistance to conventional narrative shape:
A harsher critic may say Doomers has no ending, even no clear plot. I, however, don't think a play necessarily needs these things, particularly one centring on AI and the people who control it. The circular, repetitive absurdity becomes a droning hum, and through this the audience is able to parse out the truth: these tech-nihilists only care about themselves. And even then, barely.
Dale closed with a costuming observation: The men in Doomers wear jeans so tight you can see the bulge of their phones paired with crisp shirts, blazers or t-shirts that say Jedi Master.
Between the matinee and evening performances of Doomers at the Tom Mann Theatre on Sunday 7 September 2025, Sydney Dramaturgical Company convened a free public panel: AI-pocalypse Now? Australia's AI Future. The panel was framed as a forum on how AI is reshaping Australia's creative industries — from screen to stage, design to discourse. The featured speaker was Professor Alana Maurushat, Professor of Cybersecurity and Behaviour at Western Sydney University, Director of the Western Centre for Cybersecurity Aid and Community Engagement (WCACE), and Cyber-Ambassador for the NSW Cybersecurity Node with AustCyber. The panel was free with a matinee ticket and was held immediately following the matinee performance.
Professor Maurushat wrote afterwards that the event brought together experts from academia, industry, and policy and was professionally organised and delivered, and that it demonstrated Sydney Dramaturgical's capacity to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue alongside their performance programming. Maurushat's letter of support (March 2026) is held in the company's records and is referenced on the Public Programming page.
Matthew Gasda is a New York–based playwright, novelist, and essayist. He is the co-founder of the Centre for Theater Research in Brooklyn, which premiered Doomers in February 2023. The New York Times reviewed the original New York production. In May 2025, Gasda was named to Cultured Magazine's CULT100 list.
Gasda has confirmed in writing (March 2026) his continuing collaboration with Sydney Dramaturgical Company. His letter of support for the company's 2026 Creative Australia application names Aubrey Wang's prior stage management and house volunteer work at the Centre for Theater Research during their New York period, and affirms the company's intellectual seriousness and commitment to contemporary theatre as a site of civic and philosophical inquiry. Gasda is confirmed in the company's submitted 2026 Creative Australia application as Playwright (Licensor / Collaborating Writer) for the proposed five-work program October 2026 to April 2028.
The production's split-venue structure was a dramaturgical choice as well as a programming one. Two80 Cabaret at 280 Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, is a small burlesque cabaret room described in The Scoop review as a gorgeously appointed new burlesque cabaret and theatre space. The room's intimate scale (~80 seats) suited the boardroom-condo claustrophobia of Act I. Tom Mann Theatre at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts (AMPA), 136 Chalmers Street, Surry Hills, is a larger conventional proscenium house (~200 seats) used for the 7 September matinee, evening performance, and the AI-pocalypse Now? panel. AMPA's General Manager Sophie Takatsuka confirmed the engagement in a letter of support dated 2 March 2026.
Tickets for Doomers were sold through the Sydney Fringe Festival platform.
Sydney Dramaturgical Company has applied to Creative Australia under its Arts Projects for Organisations stream for a five-work program across October 2026 to April 2028 (application R-26-497794, $85,000 requested). Matthew Gasda is named in the application as Playwright (Licensor / Collaborating Writer). Henry Lee, who designed sound for Doomers, is confirmed in the application as Sound Designer / Technical Collaborator for the proposed program.
Writer — Matthew Gasda
Director — Victoria Lenehan
Producer — Sydney Dramaturgical Company
Cast — Ben Blackler (Seth), Bryson Grenfell (Jeff), Andy Ostojic (Richard), Apollo Zephyr (Eli), Sam Goldrick (Harriet), Richie Clarke (Charlie), Leilani Faasisila (Mei), Claude Ivery (Alina), Shanel Dilip (Sanjay), Sally Williams (Myra)
Sound Design — Henry Lee
Set Design — Kyla Delacruz
Venues — Two80 Cabaret and Tom Mann Theatre (AMPA), Surry Hills
Presented by Sydney Dramaturgical Company as part of Sydney Fringe Festival 2025.
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