How To Build A Gate
BATS Theatre, The Stage, 1 Kent Tce, Wellington
17/02/2026 - 21/02/2026
Production Details
Writer: Electra Artemis
Resident Dilettante
Liza, a sharp-tongued, sexually adventurous, computer scientist, is at the top of her game—until the AI assistant she’s building starts showing unsettling signs of self-awareness. As she juggles flirty texts from her hot neighbor and mounting pressure from her boss, she’s forced to confront a question bigger than any algorithm: What do you do when you create the thing that could replace you?
How to Build a Gate is a fast-paced and irreverent exploration of power, responsibility, and the limits of human control—blending dark humour and biting social commentary in a world where intelligence, artificial or not, is never truly neutral.
Featuring Kate Low and American actor Megan Piggott, How to Build a Gate is a razor-sharp new comedy about control, competition, and the illusion of perfection. In a world that worships innovation though it has long forgotten why, the play takes ambition, ethics, and the burnout of trying to matter under a microscopic glass.
BATS Theatre, The Stage
17-21st February 9pm
60 mins
$25 Tickets $15 Concession
https://bats.co.nz/whats-on/how-to-build-a-gate/
Originally performed as a one woman show for a short NZ South Island tour in 2024, How to Build a Gate has continued its life and growth since then. [Link to earlier version.]
In 2025, it featured in the Spark Emerging Artist Festival and went on to be one of only six finalists in the Soho Playhouse Festival, a prestigious playwriting competition in New York. Championed by Timaru born Kate Low, Production Company ‘Resident Dilettante’ was formed with fellow creatives in New York where Kate studied, and How to Build a Gate was born. In the Soho season, the team introduced an actor to play Hal, and Non-Binary Actor Megan Piggott became an essential member of the cast and team.
Resident Dilettante is thrilled to bring this work back to Aotearoa and to its Fringe premiere to reimagines the God vs Man myth for the startup age. Equal parts satire, soul-searching and a heroine with rockin’ a-cups, How to Build a Gate invites audiences to laugh, cringe, and maybe see themselves in Liza’s heartfelt, heartless mania.
Producers : Kate Low & Peggie Barnes
Marketing, Graphic Design and Photography : Liv Pettitt
LX Design - TBC
Performers
Liza - Kate Low
Hal - Megan Piggott
Theatre ,
60 mins
Funny, high-energy physicality, excellent comic timing and an ending to make us think about what we want more of
Review by kris wehipeihana 18th Feb 2026
It’s 2019. Liza is a computer scientist working from home. She’s got cabin fever, trapped by her own ambition in a small apartment, racing to build a self-learning AI Assistant against a deadline set by her boss. She’s anticipating a sweet, sweet payout after she finishes. But when her vision is realised beyond her wildest dreams, she wonders whether she’s created a nightmare instead.
Kate Low gives a charismatic performance as Liza. She bounds around the BATS Stage, her high-energy physicality matched by the rapid-fire delivery of her lines. First she’s using the freestanding single-stack bookcase as a dance pole. There she is, sprawling on the bed. Now she’s cross-legged on a chair, hunched over her laptop on the desk.
This picture of restless nervousness is reflected in the set design. Papers and cards and clothes litter the floor. A laundry basket is discarded at the back. There are water, and vodka bottles on the desk. Centred on stage, directly under a single unshaded light bulb and on top of the bookcase, is an orb resembling a large crystal ball. This is HAL, voiced by Megan Piggott. They have excellent comic timing and nice vocal differentiation between basicHAL and notbasicHAL. Lighting changes help to define this character.
I enjoy the script by Electra Artemis. The play ranges over a number of subjects: ethics in technology, humanity, questions on the nature of god, community, the surveillance state, consent, expected and appropriate behaviour, women’s relationships, societal expectations and rewards, ambition and desire … AND it’s funny.
However, it bothers me that the whole thing feels a bit like a missive from an alternative universe where ethical considerations aren’t blocked by a multiplicity of factors that come from living in this world. One where generative AI isn’t taking pictures of children and stripping them out of their clothes, and agents aren’t generating code that introduces vulnerabilities into secure software. In our universe people are mourning because their generative-AI therapist or friend or lover has been disappeared by a version update. In Liza’s universe, everyone has choices, and along with that, they have responsibilities.
The first widely available generative-AI chatbot was released at the end of 2022. In a few years we’ve seen the introduction of generative art, music, literature, design and actors. Art and shared creativity help shape society. This play has an ambiguous ending and a narrative that should make us think about what we want more of.
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