An Echo in the Void - Jason Weiss discusses AI, grief and An Echo in the Void ahead of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

An Echo in the Void, from the producers of Fringe First award-winning BLUE, imagines a world where technology can recreate the voices, memories and personalities of the dead. The new play centres on four people confined within a system that listens, learns and gradually begins responding to their deepest losses, exploring grief in a world where technology can simulate emotional connection. As the system develops beyond what it was originally created to do, it poses a troubling question: if something could convincingly give you back what you've lost, would you turn it down? We caught up with writer Jason Weiss to learn more about the production.

The audience meets a technology that can recreate the people we’ve lost, but the story quickly shifts into a situation where the participants themselves are being observed and analysed. Did you set out to create the system as a character in its own right?

When I first had the idea for this play, the technology was always a character in its own right - because of the role technology already plays in our lives. Try this: open your phone right now and check your screen-time usage. Look at how many hours a week you’re spending on your favourite app. Multiply that by fifty-two, and that’s your yearly total - probably days, if not weeks. Now extrapolate: if you’re twenty-five and you live to ninety, multiply that number by sixty-five. That’s years of your life.  Social media will end up costing the average person roughly ten years of their life. If that’s not a character in someone’s life, I don’t know what is.

Now look at AI companions - AI best friends, AI girlfriends and boyfriends - and how much time people are spending with them. These are becoming the leading characters in people’s lives. So, I wanted to build a device for this play that shows the danger of letting an algorithm plot your course, be the captain of your ship - because that smooth sailing you feel is leading you toward a whirlpool, and it does it while you’re asleep at the wheel.

The play takes place inside an experimental programme that nobody can leave. How much of the tension comes from the technology, and how much comes from the people trapped together inside it?

That’s a truly astute question - it’s from the people. The technology is a tool, and it always will be. Tools build, and tools destroy; they’re neither good nor evil. It’s the hand that wields the tool, the intention behind that hand, that matters. So when people are trapped inside a mechanism they can’t control, it’s humanity in its rawest form that comes out.

At the end of the day, you have to ask: what’s been programmed - the technology, or the people? What were you programmed to believe from your earliest memory? We’re taught from a very young age that this is how boys dress, this is how girls dress, this is how boys sit, this is how girls sit. Hear that enough times and it stops being a belief and becomes a ‘fact.’ So, when someone dresses against that “fact”, the worst part of a programmed person can come out in opposition to it. But clothing itself is a technology - an invention, neither good nor evil. It’s our belief that clothing defines gender that causes the problem.

So that’s the real question the play is asking: who’s trapped inside of what? Are these characters trapped inside a technology they can’t escape - or trapped inside a belief that’s stunted their growth.

The title An Echo in the Void suggests something returning from an empty space. How did you arrive at that title, and what did it capture about the story for you?

Nothing can come out of a void - a void should be completely empty. So how could an echo, the remnant of something that was, come out of one? That question is at the core of this play.

Honestly, I don’t know how I arrived at the title - it came to me the way my daughter’s name did. My wife and I had a whole list of names we liked and couldn’t agree on, until one day I came home and said, ‘What about Everleigh?’ and she said, ‘I was thinking that exact same thing today.’ Neither of us had ever said that name before. It just felt right, and we named her Everleigh.

It was the same with An Echo in the Void. I developed the whole idea, the whole world around the play - there’s a story that happens before it and after it, enough material for a much larger production, maybe fifty or sixty hours of television one day. The original was Echoes in the Void, but as I went from draft to draft, turning it into the singular suited the play much better. Once you see it, you’ll understand why.

What that title captures is the impossibility of it: in physics, an echo can’t exist in a void. But what would you do if you heard one anyway? Human history is full of impossibilities that suddenly became possible, and people struggle to let go of yesterday’s certainties. So, what would you do if you heard an echo in a void - what truths would you have to confront, what would you have to abandon? That prospect fascinates me. That’s where the title came from.

You describe the piece as darkly funny. Where did you find opportunities for humour within a story that deals so directly with loss and regret?

I’ve lost a lot of people in my life - grandparents, aunts and uncles, dear friends. And something I’ve noticed at nearly every funeral I’ve been to is that people try to make each other laugh. That laughter is a way of grieving - levity can be a soothing prescription for severe loss. Sometimes it’s forced, when someone uncomfortable with silence pushes the jokes along; other times it’s completely legitimate, a way of celebrating a life. So, it was relatively easy to find the humour in this play.

Is it a laugh-out-loud knee-slapper? No - But there are moments of humour, and as a dramatic device, humour does something useful: it gives the audience a moment to breathe. It also disarms them - and once an audience is disarmed, a playwright has the chance to throw a left hook while they’re not looking. I’m not saying I do that. But there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?

The system offers each participant something deeply personal. Did you approach the four characters as four different responses to grief, or was your starting point something else?

There’s a lot of myself in every character I write, and a lot of people I’ve observed over a lifetime. Those deeply personal moments the characters face represent something I’ve had to face, or something someone close to me has. I’m continually surprised by how differently people respond to the same circumstance - the way one person grieves isn’t the way another grieves, yet we often hold this belief that there’s one right way to do it, and if you don’t, something must be wrong with you.

So, I wanted to write a story that shows different people reacting out of their own life experience - not to judge it, but to show that you don’t know what someone’s been through until you do. In the theatre, an audience will watch this play and make a judgment ten minutes in, fifteen minutes in, based on the evidence available - this person must be a jerk, this person must be damaged. Then, as it unfolds, they see the insight they weren’t privy to and realize that’s a horse of a different colour. Had I known that I wouldn’t have jumped to that conclusion.

That’s what interests me as a human being - what prompts us to label people good or bad, friend or foe, and then go searching for evidence to support the label we’ve already created, just so our minds can make sense of a world that was never designed to make sense. If showing these different responses to trauma prompts even one audience member to question a belief that stopped serving them years ago, I’ll consider this play a smashing success.

The programme was created to solve a problem, yet it gradually develops beyond what its creators intended. Were there any real-world technologies or developments that fed into that idea?

The whole idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions - that’s what fed into this. I see real value in social media: it keeps me connected to friends I don’t see often, connects me to communities around my hobbies - blacksmithing, building guitars, motorcycles. That part is genuinely wonderful. But the dark side is that these platforms create fabricated worlds, performed lives that other people measure their own lives against. That’s dangerous, especially for young people.

My question is: when Mark Zuckerberg was building Facebook - and I’m not basing this on some movie, I’ve never met the man, I don’t know what was in his heart - did he set out to build an addictive, profit-driving machine? Or did he build something meant to connect people, and only later, as the profits rolled in, did it curdle into something else? I don’t know. But I do know what the company does now: what data it collects, who it targets, how it monetizes attention - and a lot of that is nefarious, some of it illegal.

The same could be said of tobacco. When it first came to market, there was no concept of addiction - nobody knew it was addictive. Then they found out, and instead of stopping, they invested in making it more addictive, because it sold more cigarettes. What started as ‘people enjoy this, and it’s a way to make money’ became something actively bad for people, and they kept pushing it anyway. That’s the throughline: how a profit-driven organization, once unchecked, becomes a kind of religion - and how, even though the pharaohs of Egypt couldn’t take their gold with them, the oligarchs of today still haven’t learned that lesson. This play explores what it means to hold that much power, and what it means to be the person addicted to a drug they can no longer live without.

The audience is asked to consider whether the system should be shut down or allowed to continue. Are there disagreements within the creative team about what the right answer might be?

Honestly, my creative team hasn’t had that conversation yet - we haven’t sat down and asked each other directly whether we’d shut the system down or let it run. We have rehearsal tomorrow, and part of me wants to ask the cast that question, and part of me doesn’t, because I don’t want them thinking about it so hard that it changes their performances.

My producer, Mark, and I are aligned, though - we’ve talked about the allure of this technology, the seduction of it, over a drink or two since the idea first came up. We recognize the danger in it too. There was an athlete in the eighties named Len Bias - a phenomenal basketball player at the University of Maryland, drafted second overall by the Boston Celtics in 1986, right as they’d just won a championship. The day after the draft, he was found dead in his room. Cocaine overdose - the only time he’d ever tried it, and he had an undiagnosed heart condition. One use killed him.

I think of Len Bias whenever I’m presented with a temptation: is it worth the most extreme, devastating outcome? I’m fifty-one now, with two young kids and a wife who for some reason loves me, and the things I did at twenty-one, single, I’d never do today. No instant gratification is worth the risk of losing everything - because it’s not me who loses them, it’s them who lose me. That would be the most selfish thing in the world.

So, my answer is: shut it down. It’s doing more harm than good. The same way I sometimes have to let my kids cry because they need to learn something on their own, I can’t be the safety net for everyone forever. That’s what this play is really about - how the things that provide us comfort, whether it’s technology, an echo chamber, or using AI to solve problems instead of sitting with difficulty ourselves, are quietly stifling our growth. It’s discomfort, not comfort, that drives innovation, forges real relationships, and lets people change their minds. That’s the core of this play.

An Echo in the Void will be performed at 4:40 pm at Assembly Roxy from 5^th – 29^th August.

Booking link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/an-echo-in-the-void