PYPER - Susanna Fournier

Winner of the 2025 Tom Hendry Theatre for Young Audiences Award

An assembly of ten cyborg-AI teenagers known as Real Kids are trying to build a time capsule to prove they exist. Or maybe…it’s actually a play? Together they trace their origins back to the arrival of a strange piper in Hamelin in 1284—or was it an old puppet maker who carved a boy from a talking block of wood? The Alphas will be released any day now and they might not make it past the next update, so they’d better come up with something quick in case their models are “retired” before they even graduate.

The Breakfast Club meets The Terminator in this angsty sci-fi teen odyssey about what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. Developed with an ensemble of high school students, PYPER pulses with the electricity, confusion, and wonder of youth, while asking urgent questions about rapid obsolescence, identity, and the cost of hyperconnection. Wildly inventive and daringly poignant, PYPER will make you a follower.