exit strategy presents HOW TO WIN A GAMESHOW

NYC DEBUT BEFORE EDINBURGH FRINGE FEST RUN!

Meet Graham! Graham has been the star contestant of a popular gameshow for either 3 or 327 days. At least that’s what they tell him. Led by a series of violently charming hosts, Graham and the audience compete in EXTREMELY FUN and MYSTERIOUS games. The tasks are invasive, the stakes seemingly high, and the audience increasingly implicated. Part performance art, part improv-show, part social experiment, Gameshow blurs the line between performer and audience-rendering everyone subject to scrutiny by an ever-present, controlling, overarching force.

Gameshow is ultimately an exploration of our own capacities for complicity under observation; of our impulses as a group and as individuals; and of our presumed anonymity in theatrical, social, and technological space. 

exit strategy’s work pursues a state of primal, kinetic presence in performers and audience alike-often blurring the line between the two. We challenge the expectation that audience members can ever be passive observers in theatrical space.  Our work stands in direct contrast to film, social media, and all technologies of surveillance capitalism that encourage people to think of themselves as compliant consumers of art. We ground our research interests in themes of surveillance, conformity, discomfort, danger, humor, cruelty, and our ability to hold all of these realities simultaneously as one. 

Gameshow was developed in residency at Triplets Amsterdam in the Netherlands with support from 4bid Gallery at Ot301 in Amsterdam, Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn, and CultureLab LIC in Queens. Gameshow will have a 16-show run at the historic Edinburgh Fringe, co-produced with The SpaceUK, in August 2026. 

Performers:
Samori Etienne

MaryKate Glenn

Rupert Krüger

Jane Skapek

Gameshow is developed, directed, and performed by the company.