Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Featuring Alphonse Nicholson, Katja Hill, and puppeteer Jim Bulluck, produced through the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The Brick Theatre, Brooklyn, New York.
Gordon Craig, a director and designer working during the early 1900s, was the son of the acclaimed British actress Ellen Terry, and he was a very dangerous man. His The Art of the Theatre (1905) set the theatre world on its heels and made him as notorious as playwright Henrik Ibsen, albeit in the arena of design—typically not a terribly contentious topic. The shocking thing Craig wanted? A craftsman/artist/director who would create an artistic unity with no hierarchy of design. Everything should be seamless with a single set and no one element privileged over the other—something we pretty much take for granted today.
Slightly more disturbing to the theatre world at the time was Craig’s loathing of dramatists and actors. He didn’t want to make the written word the sole vehicle of performance, and he absolutely didn’t want star actors to be at the center either, as was the convention at the time. For him, all the problems with the theatre, all the troubles and failures could be laid squarely at the feet of these two problems. Craig’s solution was the Übermarionette, a super-puppet with no ego, no self, that could perform all the demands of the director without question or flaw.
Craig didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t until the advent of Capek’s R.U.R. in 1921, but what he wanted was a robot.
Science fiction on the stage has an embarrassment of robots these days. While the sf theatre scene in New York this season is light, robots dominate a number of offerings. In fact, a single robot dominates a number of different performances all of which are titled The Uncanny Valley. Even for the quirky theatre crowd and the even-more saturated quirky of the sf community, this is an odd occurrence. I saw but one such performance at the Brick in Brooklyn this October. Perhaps the largest question is why there are so many performances by different companies under this particular title. The easiest answer is some engineers gave a few theatre departments a new toy—a robot of their very own, an Ubermarionette.
A British company, Engineered Arts Limited <www.engineeredarts.co.uk>, began development of Robo Thespians in 2005 for a piece called “Mechanical Theatre” for the Eden Project in Cornwall. The initial mission was to make an animated presenter, something capable of repetitive explanations with gestures and expression, for installations. Building from this beginning they now make commercially available, full-sized, humanoid robots. In university settings, these robots are often shared between engineering and theatre departments. The theatre provides a context for creating different situations for programming. While this certainly wouldn’t take the place of actual experimentation on a social level, it does provide a wider set of “what ifs” for the engineers to program. I am reminded of the programming for the robots in Robots (NYRSF #259). A scene calls for dancing between one of the robots and the actor, but because industrial robotic programming calls for protocols which allow the robot to avoid collisions or contact, this can be problematic when you want controlled, physical interaction. There are a number of Robo Thespians worldwide, but only recently have they been filtering into university theatre departments.
These robots often explore the parameters of the “Uncanny Valley,” a term coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. It refers to his observation that when something containing human features looks and moves almost, but not exactly, like an actual human we respond with revulsion. From a theatrical standpoint, this is interesting because theatre’s very nature is to be almost but not quite real. A graph of the uncanny valley differentiates between moving and still objects, where immobile human likenesses cause less of a reaction than animated ones. Humanoid robots hover just outside the cusp of the valley while zombies, prosthetic hands, and bunraku puppets occupy its steep inner slopes. (For an example of bunraku to illustrate this point, see <www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEUQNvn8EJQ>.)
The small, relatively shallow stage space at the Brick delightfully necessitates minimalist and clever production design. In this instance, it’s for the best, given the relatively complex robot on stage. Nothing else competes with the actor and his mechanical partner. Set designer David Navalinsky scattered a few cardboard boxes here and there. A much abused table and chair sat at roughly stage center while the robot dominated the scene from a wheelchair. I was admittedly disappointed that, given the visible servos, the robot remained immobile for the duration of the performance. I don’t know if this resulted from choice, the needs of the play, or because the technology was just heavy and couldn’t balance or move reliably. If such was the case, it made sense to stick the thing in a chair rather than have something go horribly wrong.
The play opens in the basement of a building where we are addressed by Atropos (Katja Hill), the Fate who cuts the thread. She explains that advances in technology have essentially killed the other two. Humans figured out DNA, the Thread, so the sister who spun the thread disappeared. Then the sister who measured went, after we figured out the cures to the many diseases. Only Atropos remains. “So now it’s me. I’m all alone. They haven’t figured this out yet, but they might. I still cut. People still die. Everybody dies. For now.”
A young man, Edwin (Alphonse Nicholson), enters agitated because his identity has been hacked and stolen. For a student trying to find work and pay for school, this is a disaster. One of the university professors sends an offer to help if Edwin meets with him in the basement of an off-campus building. There he meets the curious old cleaning woman—Atropos—and a robot. The robot (controlled by Jim Bullock) has no name, though Edwin takes to calling it Dummy, and it explains that in return for participating in a series of experiments, the professor will fix the identity problem in addition to paying Edwin handsomely.
To perform the experiments, Edwin drinks a serum meant to enhance both memory and emotion. With each scene, Edwin enters more prosperous and more agitated. He meets and loses the woman of his dreams to an individual posing as him. This same individual has been responsible for stealing Edwin’s online identity. However, the mysterious person has transformed from evil identity thief/virtual dopplegänger to a mysteriously real twin who makes Edwin look shallow and selfish by comparison. Each short scene contains a personal or emotional revelation from Edwin, and each time the robot looks, sounds, and acts more like Edwin.
It appears that the robot has begun to either replace or stand in for Edwin, but the purpose of doing so is not explained. The implication is that the professor or Dummy—since we have no real guarantee that the professor even exists—engineered the identity theft in order to push Edwin into becoming a research subject off the books. Ostensibly, this is due to some ability on the part of Edwin to be more emotionally open to others, thus the serum works better on him.
Having grown exceptionally agitated by this “good twin” taking over his life, Edwin realizes that Dummy and the professor are involved and becomes so agitated that he takes another dose of serum against Dummy’s protests. For reasons unclear, Edwin experiences a great deal of pain, and Dummy feels that he must choose between the orders of the professor and the affection he has come to feel for Edwin. The robot shuts himself off for reasons of a friendship, and the play just ... ends.
Now, I am the first person to love how robots and robotics have been deployed in performance and the ways in which performance can manipulate and explore a direct relationship with technology via the surrogate robot. While I certainly enjoyed watching the robot and the design/performative possibilities, when the performance ended, I was left bemused and unsatisfied. Pondering this response, I have come to the conclusion that it wasn’t due to poor acting or production design. Nicholson depicted a wonderfully confused and earnest Edwin. He made the panic of something going wrong with your life palpable. In addition, Nicholson exhibited complete ease with acting opposite a robot—not something every stage actor can necessarily do. Robots don’t exhibit any “real” emotion or body language to play off of. Similarly, Hill made a delightfully bizarre Fate gone downhill, a Norn on the skids just trying to survive. Erratic and bouncing between intense seriousness and foolishness, Hill gave Atropos the air of one who just capriciously cuts the cord of life now that her sisters no longer measure or weave.
The utilization of multimedia was also handled well. The journeys into Edwin’s psyche were illustrated via disjointed images and video projected on the back wall of the performance space. While the projections upstage held the possibility for becoming distracting, the choice in handling them worked well. A smaller projection within the robot’s head preceded each emotional “scene” using the robot’s face as a small screen. The technology made this possible through the construction of its head. A white, plastic composite formed a soft-featured, face mask. These soft features allowed internally-projected graphics to map across the facial space of the robot, sometimes scenes or images of specific things. For example, in Edwin’s first connection with Dummy, the robot’s face sequences through a series of masks from different cultures then briefly becomes Edwin’s face before cycling through the masks again.
In addition to the images, the features of the robot change throughout the play. At the beginning Dummy possesses a neutral face—think of the look of Sonny in the film I, Robot (2004). With the opening of each subsequent scene, Dummy’s facial features subtly transform from a basic and crude attempt to look like the actor playing Edwin to a detailed simulacrum of the actor, Nicholson. The speech patterns of Dummy mirrored this transformation as well. Dummy had no particular vocal quality—neither wholly human or robotic—at the play’s beginning, but with each subsequent scene, it sounded more like Nicholson.
Although the technology and all its possibilities intrigued me, ultimately, the performance left me unsatisfied with and deeply puzzled by some extremely and decidedly odd visual and structural choices and omissions. The play is short, and rather than building the momentum of the story through continuous staging, there was an intermission during which a stage tech simply wheeled the robot from one side of the stage to the other and put some clothes on it to make it look more like Edwin. There are some problems with this dramatically and performatively.
There is no reason Edwin couldn’t move the wheelchair for Dummy if they are ostensibly becoming friends—and it would build on the problematic lack of a relationship. There’s also no reason that Atropos couldn’t have dressed Dummy, addressing her unusual and underused presence in the narrative. The performance also doesn’t provide a basis for a deep friendship between Edwin and Dummy—certainly not to the degree that robotic suicide seems like an answer. The contradiction between Dummy’s apparent feelings for Edwin and the professor’s orders didn’t quite feel compelling enough to provide a critical conflict for Dummy.
My difficulty with the performance came down to the lack of structural sense in the dramatic narrative, and I was left wondering if creator/director Francesca Talenti was entirely familiar with the possible narrative outcomes for tropes involving robots in sf. So many elements of the narrative were left unanswered. Not that a lack of answers is necessarily unsatisfying in itself—leaving gaps or uncertainties for the audience can work very well. However, there are gaps and there are chasms.
As I have mentioned before in reviews, everything on stage, by virtue of being on stage, can be imbued with importance, especially if pointed to either in the action, design, or dialogue. And therein lies the problem. Elements of dialogue refer to prior actions that have obvious meaning as they are projected on the rear screen. What happened to Edwin’s mother and its impact on him as an individual were never explained. She died, but Edwin doesn’t discuss this. There is an implication that water is involved, but did she die saving Edwin? Did Edwin see her drown? Was she eaten by an alligator? How would any one of these affect Edwin and thus the experiment? The robot doesn’t really comment on it in any meaningful way. The fact is simply thrown into the performative arena and left without comment or purpose. In a similar vein, the decision of the robot to essentially “commit suicide” lacked tension. Dummy states that he’s doing it out of friendship, and yet a deep companionship isn’t exhibited in the actions of either character. The two share little in the way of personal material—even given the serum and electrodes that allow Dummy to partake of Edwin’s emotions and memory. Significant connections are either dropped or left relatively unexamined.
Talenti chose to use a trope—human and machine/robot that can mimic or replace the human—and yet did not follow through on any of several logical progressions of the trope. At the last minute, the material shies away from several compelling possibilities: a violent and disturbing possibility of illegal and unethical experimentation, the exploitation of students in higher education by professors and universities, or our odd relationship with technology—is it a tool or is it a friend? Can it be a friend since it doesn’t possess the same emotional sensibilities of a human? Even the experiments, as focused as they are on memory and emotion, comment very little on their nature and how they affect our relationship with more complicated technologies à la the ongoing work of Sherry Turkle at MIT, to name but one person doing research in this area.
Playwrights such as Mac Rogers and August Schulenburg, both well known for their sf theatre here in New York, have expounded that sf theatre is merely theatre. To a very large extent this is true. Can you hear that I am about to say “but”? Good theatre is good theatre, just as good sf is good sf. It’s possible to produce utter drek in either case. What I think may have occurred here comes under two possible misunderstandings. In one case, there may have been an incomplete understanding of the sf-nal tropes underpinning the play, pointing to the need for further familiarity with the motifs, tropes, what-have-you related to robots in this instance. Back in the murky history of sf theatre, a major problem with material was either that playwrights were unfamiliar with sf literature or sf authors were unfamiliar with the narrative needs of performance. That is not necessarily the case these days, but it remains an issue of which artists should be aware.
The second possibility—and I wade into the minefield on this—is becoming entranced with a new technology to the point that the material focuses on the tech to the detriment of the story. Does sf theatre require special effects? No. Are well-used special effects and tech in sf theatre cool? Yes, if they serve the story.
Examples of robots and multimedia in exemplary service of the dramatic material would include the previously mentioned Voyage Extraordinaire’s Robots; Sayonara and I, Worker from the Seinendan Theater Company and Osaka University Robot Theater Project (NYRSF #295); and Opera of the Future’s Death and the Powers (NYRSF #277). In all these instances, incredibly complex technology was integral to the story. When it comes to multimedia in sf theatre, I really have to point repeatedly to Jay Scheib’s work. In Bellona, Destroyer of Cities and World of Wires, the utilization of visual media—particularly mixing live performance with visually mediated materials like camera feeds—was integral to understanding the material. In particular, Bellona (NYRSF #263), based on Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, wouldn’t have worked without it.
The Uncanny Valley is both a place on humanity’s psychological map and part of theatre’s tentative experimentation with new possibilities in stage technology, notions of the performative, and new narratives. Robo Thespians hold a great deal of potential for moving theatrical performance forward in some exciting directions. The new technology as adapted for stage performance, and the ability to use it well is still, for the most part, in its infancy. Experimentation is required both in terms of possible production design and in dramatic narrative, but not at the expense of the intimate interactions between the performative agents on the stage—human or other. The robot is and is not exactly the Übermarionette dreamed of by Gordon Craig as it can only perform to the degree that humans have programmed it. Here is where art and science intersect to create a vibrant compass to navigate past the uncanny valley.
Jen Gunnels lives in the Uncanny Mountains, high above the human plane.
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