Stepping into The Whole Sky All Diamonds feels less like arriving at a theater than starting a new job, as Bixby Elliot and director Jack Dentinger transform a Greenpoint loft into Füfl, an absurdly ambitious tech startup where audiences become employees inside a funny, increasingly poignant examination of work, technology, and human connection.
Running at Loft Story through August 22, the immersive production begins before audiences have settled into anything resembling traditional theater seats. Instead, new “employees” are checked in, badged, introduced to Füfl’s aggressively cheerful company culture, and divided into groups before being sent through the office. The cast’s dialogue as seasoned staff make the show’s premise explicit: the audience members are the missing workers in this workplace.
Eric Wiegand as Far, Aigner Mizzelle as Elena, and Adam Griffith as Mickey navigate life inside Füfl in The Whole Sky All Diamonds. (Photo: Vala Kodish)
Set in 2014, Füfl exists in that particular era when free office lunches still felt revolutionary and social media companies could plausibly sell themselves as forces for unqualified good. Adam Griffith’s Mickey embodies that optimism at its most excessive—a founder fluent in the breathless language of disruption, self-improvement, and changing the world.
Things become more complicated with the arrival of Elena (Aigner Mizzelle), a writer entering a company determined to make words obsolete. Füfl’s technology promises to anticipate what users want to communicate and replace language with increasingly personalized images, turning a ridiculous corporate conceit into something unexpectedly timely.
Lucy York Struever as Dara inside Füfl’s unconventional workplace in The Whole Sky All Diamonds. (Photo: Vala Kodish)
What makes the experience work is the freedom to decide where to look. Scenes unfold simultaneously across the office, meaning following Eric Wiegand’s Far may produce a very different evening from staying close to Lucy York Struever’s Dara, Zoë Laiz’s Jumee, or Jake Ryan Lozano’s Forrest. There is no realistic way to catch everything, and that incompleteness becomes part of the appeal.
Lucy York Struever as Dara during one of the quieter moments unfolding throughout Füfl in The Whole Sky All Diamonds. (Photo: Vala Kodish)
The office itself helps sell the illusion. Production designer Olivia Vaughn Hern and video and installation designer Geoff Bailey fill Füfl with the visual language of tech-company excess: communal desks, bright installations, laptops, odd perks, and spaces designed to look more playful than productive.
Yet Elliot’s comedy gradually reveals something more melancholy beneath all that corporate enthusiasm. The characters may work for a company obsessed with communication, but they remain remarkably bad at saying what they actually need from one another. That contradiction gives the play its Chekhovian pulse and keeps the satire from becoming a one-note sendup of startup culture.
Jake Ryan Lozano as Forrest and Zoë Laiz as Jumee participate in one of Füfl’s image-driven workplace exercises in The Whole Sky All Diamonds. (Photo: Vala Kodish)
With a cast comfortable working inches from spectators, The Whole Sky All Diamonds makes the audience feel less like observers than coworkers who have wandered into someone else’s ambitions, romances, frustrations, and unfinished conversations. It is funny, strange, and deliberately overwhelming—the kind of workplace where clocking out may leave you wondering whether everyone inside Füfl was ever truly connected at all.
