How To Build a Gate - NZ Fringe

How to Build a Gate by New York-based playwright Electra Artemis, is a witty comedy that explores the perils of creation without caution. The play was developed by the emerging production company Resident Dilettante. We are thrilled to be bringing this work to NZ Fringe 2026!

Originally performed as a one woman show for a short NZ South Island tour in 2024, How to Build a Gate has continued its life and growth since then. In 2025, it featured in the Spark Emerging Artist Festival and went on to be one of only six finalists in the Soho Playhouse Festival, a prestigious playwriting competition in New York. 

The show features two characters, Liza (played by Kate Low) and Hal, her wonderful AI creation. In the original iteration and in true one woman show form, Kate played both characters, having pre-recorded Hal's lines. Kate’s long-time friend and talented techie, Benjamin Donaldson, then pressed over 350 cues to have Liza in conversation with Hal. This was no mean feat and required expert precision from Ben offstage.

An exciting development to the show for the Spark Emerging Artist Festival and The Soho Lighthouse Series, was introducing actor Megan Piggott to play Hal. Stationed off stage, Megan puppeteers and voices Hal (the AI) throughout the show. This gave both actors lots of space to play with their dialogue, and added further depth to the relationship between the two characters. 

Since the addition of Megan into the team it's impossible to imagine the show without them, so it went without question that we had to get them to Aotearoa for this season. It is incredibly exciting to bring them over from New York for NZ Fringe, and continue Resident Dilettante's MO of international collaboration. 

Upon returning to New Zealand, Kate who is now based in Tāmaki Makaurau, was extremely keen to bring this piece back to its home turf, and  Fringe felt like a natural fit. The team were ecstatic to book a five night season at the iconic BATS Theatre and will be staging the show from the 17th to the 21st of February.

The 2026 Fringe season of How to Build a Gate consists of members from New York, Pōneke and Tāmaki Makaurau, all coming together for the first time the week before our season.  Kate and Megan will reunite for an intensive rehearsal period, and the team will configure the show into the BATS stage.

This Boosted campaign aims to cover the cost of stipends for all of our hardworking team and to support the cost of bringing Megan over from New York, and Kate down from Auckland.  We also hope it can support the cost of accommodating Kate and Megan in Pōneke for the rehearsal and show period.

It would lighten the cost of the rehearsal space we have booked for the week, and with that, limit the personal expenses for the whole team during the preparation and execution of this fantastic piece of theatre, as we deliver it to the fabulous Fringe audiences that Wellington has.

Kate Low is a Tāmaki Makaurau based actor and producer whose work spans theatre-making, performance, and the development of new work across both Aotearoa and the United States. She is a recent graduate of the Atlantic Acting School, where she refined her craft and deepened her interest in contemporary performance and collaborative storytelling. Most recently, she made her off-broadway debut in How to Build a Gate at the Soho Playhouse Lighthouse Festival.

Megan Piggott is a dynamic actor from Portland, Oregon, who graduated Summa Cum Laude with a BFA in Musical Theatre from East Carolina University. They’ve taken their talents across the country, lighting up stages from Florida to Chicago, and now thriving in New York City. Megan is dedicated to sharing stories that make people feel seen and heard, and their dedication earned them a Jeff Award nomination for Outstanding Ensemble in Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

Electra Artemis is a New York City-born and raised Off-Broadway Playwright and Screenwriter. She holds a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College, where she majored in English and minored in Astronomy. Her work has been shown in the Emerging Artists Spark Festival in New York City, and her play, How to Build a Gate, toured in New Zealand and was recently featured as a finalist in the Soho Playhouse Lighthouse Festival.

Peggie Barnes is a Ponenke based creative with a passion for bold visual storytelling and working with young people, having worked for a touring TiE company in Europe before settling in Poneke. She completed her Bachelors in Psychology and Theatre at Te Herenga Waka and dove into the theatre scene as an actor, director and puppeteer. She recently received a nomination for most promising newcomer at the 2025 Wellington Theatre Awards.

Liv is a Pōneke based photographer specialising in on set stills in the theatre and film space. She has been a photographer for over half a decade, starting off in events and weddings. Throughout her theatre degree at Victoria University she started moving more into theatre and film spaces where she found other incredible creatives to work alongside. Her talents brought her into the world of marketing for theatre, and How To Build a Gate is her second Fringe Marketing gig.

• Stipends for each member of the team.
• One week of Rehearsals in Wellington at Toi Pōneke.
• Accommodation for Megan and Kate while in Pōneke
• Travel costs to get Megan and Kate down from Tāmaki Makaurau

Tech genius, Liza can handle corporate pressure, a flirty neighbor and the chaos of modern life. But when her AI prototype starts developing a personality and maybe a little too much free will, Liza is forced to confront the fine line between innovation and disaster.

As her creation begins to outsmart, out-feel, and out-moral its maker, Liza finds herself asking the one question she never thought she would: what happens when being “the best” means you’ve made something better?

How to Build a Gate is a fast-paced and irreverent exploration of power, responsibility, and the limits of human control—blending dark humour and biting social commentary in a world where intelligence, artificial or not, is never truly neutral.

It would be a disservice to the integrity of this work to be without the two performers that shaped it into one of only 6 finalists in Soho Playhouse's Lighthouse series in New York, its most recent season, and those actors are Kate and Megan. It is so exciting to be bringing them both down to Poneke to introduce How to Build a Gate to Fringe.

This play tackles a deeply relevant topic for the modern age; AI. Its not going anywhere, so what are the ethics that guide its use, and who decides them? 

At its heart, this is a play about humanity, before it's about technology. What stands out most is the way the story interrogates the lessons we inherit from those who came before us, and how essential it is that we question those lessons in order to build a better future. 

We broach themes of motherhood, creation, and fears of a technological world that are all rooted in one central idea; that progress begins by reflecting and reassessing the past in order to find a meaningful launch point for the future. From our perspective, that thread of reflection and reckoning runs through every part of the work.

 In the two years since this play's original conception, the world of AI has changed dramatically, which only serves to reiterate the necessity of our exploration of the topic.

AI at its core, is genderless. However, because it is created by humans it reflects the same biases we have ourselves. We feel it is imperative that the role is played by a non-binary actor, as such a choice challenges traditional gender binaries and deepens the play’s exploration of identity and transformation, while also promoting inclusivity and representation in the arts and technology both within the world of the play, and outside of it.  Megan Piggott is an incredibly talented non-binary actor, and now that we live in an era where AI is taking actors' jobs, we chose to turn the tables and take an AI’s job.