An exceptionally acted, beautifully designed two-hander about obedience and dread — smart, well-crafted, working from a familiar premise.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT—Replacements, written and directed by AB Harrison, is one of those Fringe shows that’s easy to admire on craft and a little harder to fully love: a tight, tense two-hander about two office workers grinding through identical, meaningless tasks under the watch of a disembodied voice that barks orders from overhead. This is Harrison’s third consecutive year bringing an original one-act to the Great Salt Lake Fringe (after Hark! in 2024 and Park Bench Royalty in 2025), and it shows: this is a writer-director-builder with a real, developing body of work at this festival, not a one-off. Replacements is smart, it’s well made, and it went on to win Outstanding Two-Hander at this year’s festival, a call I think it earned, in some respects more than others.
The Setup
The setup is simple and effective: two workers at matching desks (same papers, same staplers, same coffee mugs) go through their day in near-perfect synchronized routine, following instructions from a voice overhead with total, robotic compliance. One of them gets “replaced” at the end of the shift. Why, or by what standard, is never explained, and that vagueness is clearly the point. This is a show about obedience and the quiet absurdity of institutional demands more than it’s a show about plot.
Familiar Ground
That said, this isn’t unfamiliar territory. There’s a Kafkaesque quality to it (that flavor of story where an ordinary person is subjected to a faceless, illogical system that never explains its rules), filtered through a Beckett-style absurdist sensibility that plenty of Fringe-circuit one-acts have drawn on over the years. It’s smartly assembled, but it landed as more familiar than surprising for me. The coin-flip ending and the “we have no names” exchange both went about where I expected them to.
I want to be precise about what my actual issue is here, and honestly, it’s both. Ambiguity can be a genuinely smart choice: refusing to spell out exactly what “the machine” represents is what lets an audience bring their own reading to it, whether that’s corporate bureaucracy, AI, the gig economy, or something more personal, and there’s real value in a piece that trusts people to do that work themselves. But that only works if the ambiguity is earning its keep, and here it’s paired with a genre that’s been worked this hard for so long that vagueness alone doesn’t feel like enough anymore. The two problems feed each other: the openness would read as more intentional in a less familiar shape, and the familiar shape would feel fresher if the openness were doing more visible work.
I went back and read Harrison’s creator’s note in the show program after the fact, and it’s a genuinely rich piece of thinking: obedience as a complete moral framework, labor demanding the kind of devotion once reserved for religion, the machine as a stand-in for institutional authority speaking in the language of policy manuals and performance reviews, the two workers as equally rational responses to an impossible system rather than hero and villain. That thinking doesn’t fully resolve my critique, though; it just confirms both halves of it. The specificity is real, on the page. But little of it made it into what’s staged, which is the ambiguity problem, and the ideas themselves, however well-articulated, are largely the same ideas this genre has been circling for decades, which is the redundancy problem. Harrison clearly has a real point of view here. What I needed from the stage was something in the execution, an image, a rule, a turn, that made both the meaning and the genre feel newly earned, and that’s the piece I didn’t quite get.
Credit Where It’s Due
That said, it’s worth separating the idea from the execution here, because there’s real credit due on that front. Workplace-as-microcosm satire is genuinely everywhere on the Fringe circuit right now, but most of what’s out there leans comedic or musical, sketch-driven send-ups of DEI trainings and Slack culture and burnout. Replacements isn’t doing that. It’s playing this material dark and dread-driven, closer in register to Severance than to workplace farce, and building a physical, puppetry-adjacent object (that machine, built by Harrison’s own hands) into something closer to a silent character than a set piece. That combination, tone plus object-theatre, is doing something less common than the genre’s reputation suggests, even if the underlying premise isn’t new.
Credit where it’s due on the writing itself, too: it’s genuinely well-built as a vehicle for two actors. Harrison clearly wrote this knowing exactly what a two-hander needs. Every beat gives both performers something to push against, from the synchronized paperwork to the escalating interrogation to the argument over who’s really responsible when the machine breaks. That’s probably why the performances land as hard as they do; the writing sets the table perfectly for Hardebeck and Brenner to do exceptional work.
Actor Highlights
Dustin Hardebeck, as the more senior Worker One, is genuinely great in this: flat, precise, almost mechanical in his delivery in a way that somehow makes him more sympathetic rather than less, especially once cracks start to show. It’s worth noting this is Hardebeck’s first-ever Fringe production, which makes the control in that performance even more impressive.
Jaxton Romeo Brenner, as the newer Worker Two, gives the show its friction and its momentum, all nervous energy and unanswered questions that slowly curdle into real doubt about whether following the rules is worth it. Brenner is a Fringe veteran at this point with a strong classical background, and it shows in how precisely he controls the character’s unraveling.
Honestly, the acting is the best thing about this show, full stop. Both performers commit completely to a demanding, repetitive physical and vocal register (that synchronized paperwork, the interrogation rapid-fire, the increasingly desperate push-up sequence) without ever letting it tip into parody. Their dynamic together is the best thing in the show; there’s a lived-in, worn-down rapport between them that sells the premise even when the plot itself stays pretty thin.
Design as the Real Standout
The design work is a real standout, genuinely the strongest element of the whole production, and honestly not a surprise. It’s the same thing I noted about this company last year in my review of Park Bench Royalty, where Harrison’s handmade dog puppet carried the emotional core of the entire show. Whatever else varies from production to production, Salt Monster’s commitment to tactile, handcrafted design consistently delivers, and here, that same instinct shows up in Replacements’ machine rather than a puppet, but the effect is the same: an inanimate object built by Harrison’s own hands that ends up feeling like the most alive thing on stage.
The whole space feels sterile and unsettling in a way that’s doing more storytelling than the script itself: dim red and blue lighting, a low electronic hum, and what sounded like a constant fan or AC drone running under almost every scene build the mood of a soulless workplace better than any line of dialogue could. There’s also the machine itself: gold-painted cardboard boxes, glowing red eyes, red-lit X buttons dotting its front, and a surprising number of moving parts, a genuinely striking, ominous presence even before it does anything. That extra layer of craft shows: the machine has a real presence and personality on stage, something closer to a silent character than a static set piece, and it’s easily the most memorable single object in the production. Small costuming choices, one worker’s tie done up properly, the other’s hanging loose, quietly track how differently the two of them are handling the pressure, and it’s the kind of detail that rewards paying close attention. If the script’s ideas are more familiar than fresh, the production design is where this show actually feels distinctive, and where this company continues to distinguish itself.
It’s worth noting, too, how differently that craft is being put to use this time around. Park Bench Royalty was a scrap-fed, one-man fable about a homeless man and his dog puppet, a story explicitly about the rituals we invent to stay human and the fragile bonds that keep us that way, told through a handmade world built from society’s castoffs. Replacements takes Salt Monster’s same tactile, handmade sensibility and points it at almost the opposite question: not how we stay human against the odds, but how a system slowly grinds that humanity out of us. Same company, same instinct for building a world by hand, but a much colder thesis this time. Whether or not you buy that the machine adds up to a fully specific statement, it’s a striking pivot for a company whose calling card last year was warmth.
What Works, and What Doesn’t Quite
The overhead voice is where the show’s satire is sharpest, and it’s worth noting the whole thing was prerecorded rather than delivered live by a stage manager or off-stage actor, a smart choice that makes the machine’s authority feel genuinely inhuman rather than just disembodied. There’s a bit where the machine declares “mandatory maintenance” and orders the workers to knock out set after set of push-ups, each one rejected as too fast, too slow, or somehow still wrong, until it stretches into something like fifty push-ups strung together across the scene, and it’s the most purely, effectively frustrating (in a good way) the show gets. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the whole piece: the fact that this is framed as routine upkeep, not punishment, is exactly the joke, and the escalating, no-win physical demand does more to make the show’s point about arbitrary evaluation than any of the dialogue does. That’s the kind of absurd, escalating-demand comedy the whole piece is clearly reaching for, and when it lands, it really lands.
Where it lost me a little was a subplot involving Worker One’s daughter. The idea, I think, is to show just how long he’s actually been trapped in this job: he can barely picture her face anymore, and near the end, pressed on when he last saw her, he essentially gives up and says something like “doesn’t matter, she’s gone, I’m too late.” That’s a genuinely strong beat on paper; it’s the clearest evidence in the whole show of what the job has actually cost him, more concrete than any of the overhead voice’s abstractions. But it just didn’t work in a 45-minute runtime. There isn’t enough room in a show this tight to let that idea build the way it needs to: it ends up reading more like a gut-punch line dropped in for effect than a thread that’s been quietly running underneath the whole piece. It’s the kind of idea that needs a longer show to earn its full weight, and here it just doesn’t have the runway.
Bottom Line
Replacements is exceptionally acted and gorgeously designed, built on a premise that’s more familiar than fresh, even as its dark tone and object-theatre staging set it apart from most of the genre’s other entries at this year’s Great Salt Lake Fringe. Harrison’s script gives two actors everything they need to shine. The physical and vocal demands alone justify the festival’s Outstanding Two-Hander award, even if I’d argue the honor is really carried by the performances more than by the writing itself. It’s the sound, lighting, and set that really make the world feel alive, more than the script does. Harrison’s thinking behind the piece is genuinely sharp, per the creator’s note, but not enough of that specificity made it onto the stage, and the ideas themselves still lean on ground this genre has covered many times before.
Show Info
What: Replacements, a one-act play written and directed by AB Harrison, presented by Salt Monster Theatre Co. Where: Alliance Theatre Blackbox, Salt Lake City, Utah When: July 25 (1:30 PM) · July 26 (4:30 PM) · August 1 (6:00 PM) · August 2 (3:00 PM), as part of the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival Runtime: Approximately 45 minutes Info/tickets: greatsaltlakefringe.org
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