The Talent

On stage is a small sound booth; inside it sits a woman, alone. She is a voice-over artist. Off stage, in a space never seen but only heard, two disembodied voices ask her to conjure different voices for commercials, self-help audiobooks, meditation tapes, computer games, robo-calls…. anything and everything. In amongst this post-pandemic vocal-soup, is she the powerful protagonist in her own narrative, literally building her own reality – and ours too? Or is she a cheap ventriloquist of capitalism’s audio debris, speaking into the void.

The Talent is a new show by Action Hero & Deborah Pearson about the voice and human presence in the 21st Century. Where does the voice live? How will her voice live on, outside her body, if it can take on a life of its own? The Talent asks what kind of ghosts will haunt us in when we’re gone, and what the legacy of the human voice might be in a non-human future.