://SHELF_LIFE at Orlando Fringe Credit: Courtesy Photo

I’m personally waging a passive-aggressive Cold War with my Alexa devices and have defiantly disabled Siri on my iPhone, so the idea that someone would want to transform a beloved human being into an artificial intelligence avatar seems absurd to me. But with ://SHELF_LIFE, writer-performer Zachary Scalzo takes what could just be a chilling near-future parable, and transforms it into a platform for personal connection that’s surprisingly realistic and relatable. 

Wearing khakis and a keycard lanyard, Scalzo plays Lucas, a bald, bespectacled IT employee who is in charge of testing an advanced AI. After uploading the diary of his favorite relative into the database — an ethical crime on par with microwaving fish in the shared breakroom — and becoming obsessed with the resulting unhuggable hologram, a new colleague recruits Lucas into altruistic industrial espionage, leading to life-changing consequences. 

Scalzo speeds through his twisty soliloquy, delivering a mix of narration and dialogue; he’s sometimes too subtle in varying his posture and tone to distinguish between characters, but director-designer David Pilchman’s organic blocking and choreographed scene transitions help keep the stage pictures from becoming too static, despite the minimalist set and props. 

The script’s snappy repartee with jokey jargon gradually gives way to something deeper, and while I could do without the unnecessarily elliptical obfuscation of key plot points simply to extend the mystery, ://SHELF_LIFE’s surprising finale shatters more than just the fourth wall. By boldly breaking with theatrical convention and abandoning the fiction we’ve become invested in, Scalzo leaves viewers with something much more honest and emotionally affecting than they knew they’d signed up for.

Zachary Scalzo (Oklahoma City, OK)
Brown Venue, Lowndes Shakespeare Center
60 minutes; 13 and up
Tickets: $15

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This article appears in Orlando Fringe 2026.