Theater Ookleck will return to the village with Mickle Maher’s “Song About Himself” April 10‑12 in Herndon Gallery. The play imagines a post-internet world in which Carol, one of few with relative language fluency, interacts with a mysterious social media site. Pictured are Diana Slickman as Carol and Colm O’Reilly as Host/Hostess in the play’s 2015 debut. (Photo by Evan Hanover)
Theater Oobleck stages post-web dystopia at the Herndon
- Published: April 10, 2026
The Herndon Gallery at Antioch College will host Chicago-based theater collective Theater Oobleck for three performances of “Song About Himself,” a dystopian, language-driven play by ensemble cofounder Mickle Maher, Friday–Sunday, April 10–12.
The production will mark Theater Oobleck’s second visit to the village after bringing “The Hunchback Variations” to the Foundry Theater in 2024. That show held up the creative process writ-large to a tragi-comic light, and “Song About Himself” continues Theater Oobleck’s practice of examining what it is to be human, this time in a world gone feral after the collapse of the internet.
The play greets audiences immediately with fragmented speech from its focal character, Carol. Unlike those with whom she interacts regularly in gesture and “mumbles,” Carol retains some language fluency, which leads her to encounter, as Theater Oobleck describes, “a mysterious social media site created by a rogue artificial intelligence within the Web itself, only to find that, strangely, she is its only member.”
Playwright Maher, who spoke with the News last week, said the play’s premise grew out of anxieties that were already present when it premiered in 2015.
“If you’re going to write a dystopian future about the internet, AI was absolutely unavoidable,” he said. “It wasn’t what it is today, but that’s where we were headed — the difficulty of identifying what is human and what is not on the internet. I wasn’t any Nostradamus for predicting that.”
The play leans hard into science fiction — of which Maher said he’s proud, since plays don’t have “access to spectacle” in the same ways that films do. Instead, “Song About Himself” relies on language to communicate its core concerns about how people connect — or fail to do so. The world that reveals itself within the play is one in which the internet — the major point of connection for humankind — has been struck a fatal blow.
“What if someone just wrote some malware, and it destroyed everything? There would be nothing we could do,” Maher said. “The dystopian conceit of the play is that, if the internet suddenly collapsed after we’ve invested all of our cultural energy and memory into it … it would be like a trauma. … What would that do, worldwide, to our ability to communicate?”
He noted that the play is “wordy in a perverse way,” in that it requires the audience to be carried along by the curious rhythms and tones of its language as Carol interacts with the AI “Host/Hostess,” as well as the mysterious Tod, who throws a wrench into the AI’s plan when he attempts to log on.
“There’s a lot going on in the play that I don’t expect people to get,” Maher said. “But hopefully they can follow the plotlines of the story and be moved.”
The cast features Theater Oobleck ensemble member Diana Slickman as Carol, alongside Vicki Walden as Host/Hostess, and H.B. Ward as Tod. Slickman, who previously appeared in the company’s local production of “The Hunchback Variations,” originated the role of Carol and returns to it more than a decade later.
“Diana’s my go-to; she’s in pretty much everything I’ve done over the last decade or more,” Maher said. “Playing the part again 11 years later, it’s different, but much of what she brought to it before is still there. She had to completely rediscover the part.”
Maher described the play’s unusual syntax as particularly demanding for actors, but said both performers and audiences can ballast themselves via some familiarity with the work of Walt Whitman.
“A lot of the language is a corrupted version of his verse,” he said, citing Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as inspiration. “Just read a little bit of Whitman before you come; a few lines to sort of refresh yourself.”
Theater Oobleck was founded in the 1980s and operates without directors, instead developing work collaboratively among ensemble members. That ethos carries through to “Song About Himself,” and the play is staged with minimal design. Maher said many of his works have been written to be performed “in any kind of room,” and “Song About Himself,” too, is adaptable to untraditional spaces.
“It’s best performed in the round — or in the rectangle, as we have it now,” he said. “We’re pretty flexible with it.”
Maher described the “in the rectangle” setting — that is, with the audience seated on all four sides of the cast — as paramount to the production. The configuration places the audience in close proximity to the actors, but also within intimate line-of-sight of one another.
“It’s unavoidable to see your fellow audience members,” Maher said. “They become the set and other characters in the play in a kind of ghostly way.”
That closeness, he added, creates a sense of shared experience that both echoes and contrasts with the isolation depicted onstage.
“There’s a feeling of community that you have when you put people in a circle, and you imagine the first theaters maybe were like that,” he said. “Just people around a campfire, telling stories.”
Maher said “Song About Himself” is the “least funny” and “saddest” of his plays, though he noted that Slickman is “hilarious” as Carol. At the same time, he said, the play leaves some room for the possibility that connection, however fragile, can still be rediscovered.
“There’s a kind of tiny sliver of hope,” he said.
Performances of “Song About Himself” run about 90 minutes and will take place Friday and Saturday, April 10 and 11, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, April 12, at 2 p.m., at Herndon Gallery in Antioch College’s South Hall. Seating is limited. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $5 for students and youth; for more information and tickets, go to http://www.bit.ly/SongAboutHimselfHerndon
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