Becoming Jeff Bezos – Q Theatre Loft: March 13, 2025 (13th Floor Theatre Review)
Becoming Jeff Bezos puts two characters on stage with two contrasting takes on a dystopic Aotearoa after the climate apocalypse has hit. When they confront each other, sparks fly.
Gloria (Rima Te Wiata) is a cunning survivalist, ostensibly not having left her mountain-top for decades – and the very last person on this shrunken flooded planet to join Uber Eats. (Even the isolated Sentinel Islanders have joined up!) Jeff (Nī Dekkers-Reihana) is the ultimate employee in a society where you need to work three jobs to afford a literal hole in the wall. Jeff is going to sign up Gloria to Uber Eats if it kills her.
And it might.
“Jeff” is not all she seems. (But neither, it turns out, is Gloria). In a form of personality-cargo-cultism, “Jeff” has changed her name to match her hero in a bid to attract success. And Gloria, as I said, is not all she seems either.
It’s a recipe for more than just the drone-delivered cheeseburger that Gloria needs to order to clinch “Jeff’s” deal. If you ordered black humour at this point, your delivery is on the way.
This was a reading only, not a full performance – the play is still “a seed” (he kākano), so we don’t see action. It’s like showing up to watch a radio play, imagination instead is invited to take wing. Based in Edinburgh, young playwright Alex Medland is already the winner of the 2025 Adam NZ Play Award for We’re Gonna Kill Billy, and was awarded the 2024 b425 Playmarket award for Becoming Jeff Bezos, giving the chance to showcase it here, and workshop it for a full-on production.
The reading’s two-person cast is ably supported by narration and more by Katrina George and Caleb Teaupa. (It was delightful to see George’s warm smile, reading ahead, each time she anticipated the script’s humour-to-come.)
The crux of the play is the confrontation between the two characters, each of them with a few tricks up their sleeve. Fans of Stephen King’s Misery would understand the atmosphere. Admirers of the film Brazil might appreciate the situation. Stakes are raised, inebriation takes hold, temptations are offered, buried skeletons emerge. Neither character is entirely honest – the back and forth between Te Wiata and Dekkers-Reihana is magical. Even in a simple play reading it was ethralling. One can imagine the full effect on stage being electrifying.
There were a few minor problems, partly in geography. (Islands still exist but Parnell is flooded.) And partly in the tension, which I’d like to see ramped up even more as the confrontation intensifies. And that might of course just be the difference between a reading and a full performance.
The play contains an intriguing idea cunningly worked out. I look forward to seeing it in production.
THEATRE PETER
Becoming Jeff Bezos, by Alex Medland, is read one more time at Q Theatre Loft on 14 March 2026.
Tickets and more info here at the Auckland Arts Festival website.
