One response to impending apocalypse is to fight fire with fire. If rapacious capitalism got us here, then one should protect oneself by winning in the game at hand. And what purer expression of capitalism is there, “The Hands That Feed You” posits, than the game show?

InAnnie Danger’spiece atCounterPulse周五开幕,10月6日,往往的一部分erloin company’s namesake festival, audience members compete for real cash prizes. (I was one of the competitors opening night, and the $20s onstage were real.) Here, if you win a round, you pick another contestant’s fan of bills to filch from. “Family Feud” fans will recognize the thievery and the style of question; audience members respond to poll questions in real-time via an app, and contestants guess what the most popular answer will be.

But let’s back up. There’s also another, more difficult response to global catastrophe, which is to reject capitalism altogether and imagine something new. “The Hands That Feed You,” one of the most brilliant pieces of Bay Area performance art in recent memory, doesn’t just explore both options. First, it shows how easy it is to get sucked into the rat race’s rules and assume there’s no other way to exist. Case in point: When I was up there under the stage lights, it never occurred to me that I could choose not to play the game or forgo stealing from my comrades.

As we were first called onstage, we were asked to do embarrassing things — pantomime, with grunts, a recent defecation or, in my case, whisper what I wish my father would have said to me in my youth (Sorry, Dad!) — in exchange for a $20. Ostensibly we had a choice, but all five of us quickly sold our dignity for an Andrew Jackson, feeding the audience’s schadenfreude (and likely their relief that they hadn’t thrown their hats in the ring to be contestants). But in our defense, who could resist Danger, in her jaunty red suit with blue racing stripe, her knowing smile and the mischievous gleam in her eye, her teasing patter and spicy questions, all of which, not coincidentally, are about how low we’d stoop to survive the end of the world?

But then, “The Hands That Feed You” models how to interrupt governing systems that are as thick as noxious air: with a bolt of lightning and a clap of thunder. A show that seems to be one kind of thing doesn’t have to stay that way. Yet even as she incites revolution, Danger has a keen sense of how to build a narrative bridge from one scene to a radically different one; she doesn’t all at once upend everything we have painstakingly come to believe as true. She guides us. A lightning round in a game show can invite the rest of the audience in and get serious. That can segue into a poetic monologue about loss and renewal, inspired by an excursion into nature in Danger’s native Albuquerque.

“The Hands That Feed You” ultimately puts its fate in its audience’s hands, in a way that makes you feel, without cliché, that change is possible and you could enact it. It invites us to follow some guidelines, but Danger and CounterPulse abdicate any enforcement role. Instead, spectators themselves envision and then, for a few minutes, embody what a utopia might look like.

For those afraid of audience participation, there’s no gotcha moment; everything that happens emanates from collective will. Danger, who’s trans, leaves space, too, for mourning what humanity has already lost as we careen toward a pick-your-own-apocalypse, and on opening night queer audience members led the way in performing spontaneous acts of care and creating ritual and meaning from thin air. Before the world ends for real, let’s look to them and to Danger for ways forward.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com