Billy Bowtie, the titular creation of “Palatable Gay Robot,” isn’t just a high-concept character created by Stephen Brower. He’s a live demonstration of how identity gets shaped, branded, and consumed. The solo show, coming to Bridge Street Theater March 6–8, unfolds as a product launch: Billy is a newly calibrated gay humanoid, presented to executives (and the audience) as a sleek, market-ready solution for cishet women seeking a gay best friend. What follows is a fast-moving coming-of-age story that doubles as a critique of entertainment culture and the ways queer identity is packaged for mass appeal.
Brower developed the character over several years with director Zach Prince, gradually building Billy’s physicality and inner logic. “It started as an idea that I wanted to play a gay robot,” Brower says. “My director and I worked for many months developing the script alongside the character—figuring out how his calibration works, what kind of humanoid he is, how advanced he is.” The robot’s gestures, speech, and movement are precise enough to feel engineered, yet porous enough to let doubt—and eventually self-awareness—leak in. “We’ve been working on it for three years now,” he adds. “It feels second nature, but it definitely took a while to get into the robot’s physicality.”
The show is structured as a 75-minute demonstration that compresses a lifetime: infancy, adolescence, rebellion, and the hard work of defining oneself on one’s own terms. At the heart of “Palatable Gay Robot” is a question Brower keeps returning to: What does it mean to be accepted, and at what cost? Billy is designed to be likable, especially to a target demographic Brower knows well from his own career as an online creator. Brower has amassed more than 250,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok, where his short, humorous videos about dating and daily life circulate widely—largely among heterosexual women.
“That was really interesting to me, and also unsettling,” Brower says. “I felt like an idealized version of a gay best friend—a parasocial gay best friend.” He doesn’t frame the dynamic as inherently good or bad. “I didn’t dislike it or like it. I just found it fascinating,” he says. Billy Bowtie, within the logic of the show, is explicitly designed for that audience, which allows Brower to explore what happens when identity becomes a product optimized for consumption.
Those tensions animate the show’s humor, which arrives quickly and lands hard, before revealing sharper edges. Brower didn’t set out to write a polemic. “We really started with humor,” he says. “We had no intention of it being this complex meta social commentary.” The critique emerged only once audiences began responding. “As we started performing it, we realized it had commentary that was bigger than just me—it mirrored the entertainment industry pretty well.”
Audience response has surprised him, particularly from older queer viewers who recognize themselves in Billy’s arc. “I’m always really moved when older queer people see themselves in it,” Brower says. Though the show is laced with internet-era language and millennial reference points, its emotional core reaches across generations. Brower situates his own experience between two worlds: one shaped by past eras he didn’t directly live through (Stonewall, AIDS), and another in which queerness is often embraced more openly. “It leaves my generation in this middle area,” he says, “where it’s okay to be gay as long as you’re the right kind of gay.” That tension becomes Billy’s starting point.
The show’s structure reinforces its themes. Billy is overseen by a Moderator, heard as a disembodied voice, who introduces and manages the demonstration. Brower describes the relationship as parental. “She has to decide: do I let my creation make his own mistakes, or do I take control on behalf of the company?” he says. As Billy exceeds his programming, the Moderator’s authority—and benevolence—are put to the test.
Performing the piece solo offers Brower both freedom and exposure. “I feel in control of the audience’s attention,” he says. “I get bored easily, and I’m ruthless as an audience member, so my own brain keeps me honest.” The payoff, he notes, is radically different from online validation. “If someone tells me they’ve seen the show and it really impacted them—that’s so meaningful,” he says.
“Palatable Gay Robot” doesn’t offer a tidy moral. Instead, it traces the messy process of becoming sentient—of rejecting a prefabricated version of self and insisting on something harder to categorize. In doing so, Brower turns a satirical product demo into a pointed, humane exploration of how identity is shaped in public—and what it takes to reclaim it.
