The latest performance by the Viennese collective Gods’ Entertainment delivers a compelling unboxing of the Amazon universe. What stands out is how convincingly it frames this global company as a form of occupation—one that permeates everyday routines, shapes language and thought, and extends into material, territorial realities, even implicating its users in the infrastructures that sustain real-world occupations and wars. Although this might suggest a purely horror-like exercise, the performance instead brims with surges of unruly humour, and moments that challenge the absurdity of theatrical conventions.
This dynamic begins even before the performance itself, with the selection of a “Prime” audience upon entering. By virtue of an unspecified privilege, this group receives special treatment throughout the show: more stage time, food and drinks, parcels to unbox, and even acts of care such as feet-washing.
Entering our box for the evening, we are then confronted with a flock of Bezoses in all kinds of attire, each featuring true-to-but-still-larger-than-life papier-mâché heads. A large cardboard box looms at the back of the stage, haunting the performance until its very end. The piece opens in a warehouse setting: robots take over the choreography, moving to classical music, while stacks of plastic crates are humorously granted a ten-minute break. Seemingly playful, the scene points to the documented realities of Amazon warehouses, raising the question of who is allowed leisure within the capitalist grind.
As Bezoses start to come to life, they slowly move into an Amazon symphony, a conducted piece for an orchestra composed of different Amazon-available products such as juicers and drills, with a special vibrator solo act. We can see that there is a system being made following instructions of use (literally used as a score). What emerges is a tight constellation of goods and content—a self-contained “box-world” with its own rules, hierarchies, and logic. Within it, Bezos effectively crowns himself ruler. After all, how could he not be the best in a world of his own creation?
Gradually, the performance begins to shift and multiply, almost kaleidoscopically, as Gods start unpacking (pun intended) the references they have set up. A few striking images stand out: a human hand drowning under a flood of boxes, reminding us that there is always a person behind—or buried beneath—each Amazon parcel; human bodies used as stamps for the Amazon logo, pushing the commodification of the body to an absurd extreme; or The Man Who Sold the World playing from one of the Bezos heads. As usually in their case, Gods are in the details.
At one point, a now headless Bezos pulls a long barcode scroll from his mouth and scans this newly formed “tongue,” projecting a poem by Kevin Killian onto the large box. During several years and with a clear intent to subvert the logic of this capitalist language, Killian placed more than 2000 Amazon “reviews” totally unusable to the general logic of its commercial goal as they were poetic fragments, autobiographical snippets, etc. Building on this great material and the overall gesture of subversion, the performance detects the dangers of the review-lingo that penetrates our bodies and makes us speak the logic of capitalism.
Amid a surge of chaotic action depicting Bezoses well-known obsession with living forever, Forever Young by Alphaville blares—a song that famously blends the fear of nuclear catastrophe with the desire for eternal youth. In this context, its lyrics “are you gonna drop the bomb or not?” land differently. As a grenade is passed through the audience for signatures, the performance cuts straight to the core of our present. Dare we close our eyes when faced with our own responsibility in supporting Amazon’s involvement in wider systems of conflict? What does our mouse-click actually trigger?
A personal highlight features a Bezos figure playing Konjuh planinom on the piano. Originating in the Yugoslav antifascist struggle of WWII, the song evokes a bond between partisans and nature, with the forest mourning their loss. By invoking this imagery, the performance connects past resistance to the present, questioning whether nature can still offer shelter or alliance—and answering bluntly: think again. The striking “ending” culminates in a tense stand-off between the audience and a giant terrarium, violently unpacked from the cardboard box by a blindfolded Bezos. Filled with plant-like weapons—or weapon-like plants—nature appears not as refuge, but as a threatening structure of our own making. In this confrontation, both audience and Bezoses face the consequences of what has been set in motion, underscored by a soundscape of helicopters, screams, and distant horror. It is as if nature screams—when it should have been us.
The stage falls silent as the only non-Bezos figure—a real, unmasked human—steps forward, as if to take the final bow. In that moment, he becomes the only one we can truly applaud. As a newly formed performance community, we seem to exclude Bezos from the only category system still available to us in this setting—that of the theatre audience. In a modest gesture, free of irony, the applause turns toward the human figure. Not as a celebration, but as a recognition: that it is the human who is both responsible for this system and the only one capable of changing it.
Jana Dolečki is an independent theatre scholar, co-artistic director of DAS WEISSE HAUS, program coordinator at Radio ORANGE 94.0, and conductor of the choir Hor 29. Novembar.
