Philly Fringe 2025: Leftovers Collective presents Angela Harmon’s Terms of Use: A Millennial Farce

I’m an elder Millennial who used the family desktop for AOL chats in the 90s, got my first Nokia brick in college, and reluctantly joined Facebook in 2009 after a friend announced their cancer diagnosis there instead of calling. Today, since I fled the Twitter stews, my obligatory Bluesky account mostly languishes, I grudgingly make Instagram videos about things I would have sold as an op-ed 10 years ago, and I would rather jump out of a plane than join TikTok. So I was drawn to this show exploring “the millennial relationship with the internet: from the innocent MySpace years to the technofascist nightmare of today.”

The last people on earth who didn’t carry the world

The opening trio (Jon Braun, Anthony Diaz, and Angela Harmon, who also writes and directs), each simply dubbed “Millennial” in the playbill, pose interesting questions about life on the Internet for our generation, like how do we feel as “the last people on earth to know what it's like to not carry the world around with us?”, “what’s [the Internet] doing for us, anyway?” and whether the purpose of a system is the same as what it does.

They segue into a dystopian game show called “Do You Like It” in which a condescending host (Diaz) poses one question each to the other two. They answer, then get 60 seconds to talk it through to themselves, and if they still give the same answer at the end, they win. The questions ("Do you like pictures of you on the Internet? Do you like logging in?") peel back the messy ethical and psychological quandaries of the digital world.

Messy conclusions

From there, the show hits murkier conceptual waters. Braun, Diaz, and Harmon perform with charm and commitment, but the disconnected segments lack any arc or narrative. Interludes from an instrumental alt-rock trio (Mike Fisher on drums, Chris Forsyth on guitar, and Gwendy Wendell on bass) evoke the era, but don’t add meaningfully to the themes.

Maybe Millennials are responsible for what is happening to the Internet and specifically social media, the researchers posit. After all, we were the first ones to sign the terms of use. Harmon then devotes what feels like a third of the total runtime (less than an hour) to reading, in full, the terms of use of a famous Pennsylvania chocolate company while the band plays more and more loudly. The absurdity of the terms of use we blithely click every day is a worthwhile topic, but this is not an effective way to engage the issue onstage.

The opening-night show closed with a song whose lyrics we couldn’t hear because Fisher’s mic seems to have cut out for the duration, a sound hiccup I hope the crew can solve in the remaining performances (through September 28). But either way, it’s a messy conclusion that left the audience unsure of whether the show had just ended.

A mid-air leap of faith

Especially with its onstage band and a simple yet fun tactile audience participation element, Terms of Use is admirably ambitious. Projections designed by Braun trigger Millennial nostalgia, from Windows welcome screens to a snake-draped Britney Spears at the 2001 VMAs to “Vote for Pedro.” The show boasts an assistant director (MB McLaughlin) and even a dramaturg (Levi Chaplin-Loebell). It seems like this team has plenty of ideas, which I hope they’ll develop further in future.

The playbill calls the show the first of many Leftovers Collective projects “exploring these weirdly specific themes about who we are, where we are, and who we’re becoming.” In her director’s note, Harmon says the project is “a mid-air leap of faith in every way.” The Fringe is the right place for this kind of experimentation.