Since audiences first gathered at theater festivals in Historical Greece, humanity has seemed to the stage for metaphysical steering. The theater, a spot the place human beings watch different human beings faux to be totally different human beings, is sort of naturally outfitted to wrestle with huge existential questions.
For Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, mortals had been measured in opposition to the gods and located to return up quick (even because the gods themselves have a lot to reply for). Defying this energy discrepancy is the supply of each hubris and heroism within the protagonists of classical tragedy.
Shakespeare, against this, probed the bounds of consciousness relating to the human situation. How a lot ontological reality had been we able to? Can the “paragon of animals,” in Hamlet’s brooding formulation, actually quantity to nothing greater than a “quintessence of mud”?
Chekhov and Beckett, to deliver the dialogue to the fashionable period, demanded little extra from their characters than endurance. Stamina is what’s required of these born into an earthly actuality, for which, to cite mordant Beckett, there isn’t a remedy.
No technological breakthrough will ever nullify the knowledge of those playwrights. The shadow of loss of life sentences us to dwell in infinite search of elusive that means. However the introduction of synthetic intelligence has given a brand new prism by which to view these unresolved existential questions.
As I’m penning this, a New York Instances alert simply posed an pressing query on the display screen of my cellphone: “The existential menace of AI is not science fiction. What will we do now?”
One defiantly analog reply is to look to our playwrights.
On the Matrix Theatre, Lauren Gunderson’s “anthropology” is having its North American premiere in a Rogue Machine Theatre manufacturing directed by John Perrin Flynn. The play, which premiered on the Hampstead Theatre in London in 2023, imagines a grieving pc knowledgeable who builds an AI reproduction of her sister, who disappeared and is presumed to be lifeless.
Merril (Alexandra Hellquist), a coder and AI knowledgeable, is spiraling after the lack of her youthful sibling, Angie (Kaylee Kaneshiro). Merril was her main caretaker, and the guilt she feels is taking a damaging toll.
Her incapacity to maneuver on has value Merril her relationship with Raquel (Julia Manis). To deal with the outlet that has opened within the middle of her life, Merril feeds into “a machine studying natural-language program” all the knowledge on her sister’s laptop computer and cellphone to re-create a pc model of Angie, first simply in audio kind earlier than the video kinks are labored out.
King Lear, bearing the brunt of a storm, appears at what he thinks is a mad beggar and wonders if “unaccommodated man” is not more than “a poor, naked, forked animal.” Merril, chatting with this new incarnation of her sister, can’t assist questioning if a human being is not more than the sum whole of their emails, voicemails, personal messages, on-line search historical past, social media exercise, leisure selections, Wordle options and purchases and returns.
The Angie that Merril has created takes on a lifetime of her personal. She positive aspects entry to Merril’s cellphone and texts Raquel to hasten the 2 girls getting again collectively. In a much less welcome intervention, Angie additionally texts their estranged mom, Brin (Nan McNamara), a recovering drug addict, who’s coping with her personal regrets of getting failed as a mum or dad. All of the previous household trauma has bubbled as much as the floor since Angie’s disappearance.
By feeding the digital stays of her sister right into a repurposed chatbot program, Merril explains that she’s created a system that may predict what Angie would say based mostly on all the knowledge it has about her previous. This new Angie is as impetuous, brash, willful and secretive as the unique.
Merril, the Dr. Frankenstein of “anthropology,” has unleashed a digital creature that doesn’t appear all that intimidating when making sarcastic quips on the pc display screen. However identical to the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, this one can also be decided to check the bounds of the life it has been illicitly granted.
The difficulty-making potential of AI catalyzes an intriguing dramatic premise right into a full-blown plot. Gunderson, a prolific and common playwright whose works embrace “I and You” and “The Ebook of Will,” is a extra orthodox author than Jordan Harrison, whose play “Marjorie Prime” tackles related thematic materials however in a extra austere dramatic kind.
Lois Smith and Frank Wooden on the planet premiere of Jordan Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime” on the Heart Theatre Group/Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Craig Schwartz)
There’s much less exposition in “Marjorie Prime,” which premiered on the Mark Taper Discussion board in 2014. The play, which was tailored right into a 2017 movie, is having its Broadway premiere this fall, starring June Squibb within the title position.
A lot has modified within the intervening 11 years since “Marjorie Prime” debuted. In an age that’s critically weighing the advantages of AI psychotherapy, the notion of “primes,” android-like figures programmed to function therapeutic companions for bereft family members, not looks like such a science fiction leap.
Not like in “anthropology,” the departed are introduced again in three dimensions. These aren’t robots — they’re performed by actors — however they’re merchandise of expertise all the identical.
The position of reminiscence as a defining function of being human is a by line in each performs. The dementia afflicting 85-year-old Marjorie is seen as an assault on her identification. But when an individual’s knowledge might be funneled right into a machine, what does that do to our understanding of the self? Has the distinctiveness of human individuality been shattered? Are all of us replaceable with sufficient data on our web habits?
Jon Hamm and Lois Smith in a scene from the film “Marjorie Prime.”
(FilmRise)
Earlier than a first-rate is manufactured of Marjorie after her loss of life, she has a first-rate of her personal to maintain her firm. She opts for a duplicate of her late husband as a a lot youthful man. (Jon Hamm performed the position within the movie, a casting alternative that may assure a run on primes had been they available within the market.)
Harrison retains altering the configuration of people and primes, forcing us to determine not solely which is human and which is software program however what’s the standards for figuring out the distinction.
Gunderson has written a extra plot-heavy household drama. However as her title suggests, she too is making a examine of man. With out giving an excessive amount of away, the display screen Angie and the dwelling Angie finally confront one another. Each are performed by the identical actor, however Kaneshiro sharply differentiates the 2 characters.
The one on the monitor is extra boldly outlined. Angie’s salient qualities are drawn out. The AI-generated Angie appears a bit overdone when in comparison with the extra conflicted human unique, whose moodiness shifts mercurially between impudence and ambivalence.
Angie on-screen and Angie in-person are as totally different as a textual content from Angie and her precise voice. This distinction is an efficient deal extra dramatically compelling than the considerably overwrought psychological drama that exerts a regressive pull on “anthropology.” However in Gunderson’s protection, she’s making an attempt to assist her viewers navigate a world that’s shortly outstripping fantasy fiction.
“Marjorie Prime” has its personal trauma plot, although the structure of the play filters the household dynamics by a conceptual lens. Within the Taper manufacturing, directed by Les Waters, the play got here throughout as coldly summary regardless of the prickly heat of Lois Smith’s Marjorie. Anne Kauffman, who directed the New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2015 and is staging the play on Broadway with a solid that features Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein and Christopher Lowell, has a expertise for locating the emotion in rigorously unsentimental writing.
Humanity is at stake each thematically and theatrically in “Marjorie Prime.” And one of many challenges of this period of performs grappling with the collateral harm of AI on the conceit of our species is determining learn how to relate to characters which might be fun-house mirror reflections of human beings. The irony, duly famous by dramatists, is that the technological monsters we’re creating bear lots of our personal options — in exaggerated if uncannily acquainted kind.
Ruthie Ann Miles, left, and Robert Downey Jr. in Lincoln Heart Theater’s manufacturing of “McNeal.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerma)
Playwrights and administrators have an obligation to information audiences by the courageous new technological world that’s overturning lots of the bedrock assumptions of humanism because the Renaissance. Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” which had its premiere final yr at Lincoln Heart’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in a manufacturing starring Robert Downey Jr., failed exactly as a result of it abdicated this duty.
Is the author on the middle of the play a literary compilation dreamed up by an AI program or an precise human character? And are the occasions of the play permutations spit out by a pc or representations of a protagonist’s thought of dramatic actions? Akhtar’s dedication to maintain all prospects open made it arduous to emotionally spend money on a piece that finally got here throughout as too intelligent by half.
Annie Dorsen carried out her AI piece “Prometheus Firebringer” at REDCAT.
(Angel Origgi / Courtesy of REDCAT)
New content material requires new types, however AI is doing greater than producing new materials: It’s shattering previous paradigms. No level in pretending that we will preserve the identical footing, however theater-makers do an incredible service once they survey this slippery terrain.
Annie Dorsen, an experimental director who’s a pioneer of algorithmic theater (in addition to a buddy and former colleague), introduced “Prometheus Firebringer,” a hybrid lecture and efficiency work, to REDCAT in June. The piece, which provided speculative AI generated variations of the misplaced last play of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy accompanied by a chat composed of discovered textual content on the web regarding the themes of tragedy and reminiscence, tantalizingly embodied questions on authorship, authenticity and human company that AI disruptively raises. It was directly a stark avant-garde curio and a communal conversation-starter about illustration and actuality.
Expertise, as the parable of Prometheus illustrates, has the ability to radically overturn our day by day lives. Artists, acutely targeted on the way in which we dwell now, can’t assist paying shut consideration to the ramifications of AI not simply in our work however in our notions of personhood.
The theater, an artwork kind that relies on the dwelling presence of actors and viewers members, is a perfect medium to discover the deconstruction of “I” and “we” that’s occurring whether or not we acknowledge it or not. (In Harrison’s newer play, “The Antiquities,” set within the far future, the stays of humanity are preserved in a museum that traces the technological path of our species’ demise.)
The stage has been having a area day satirizing the way in which we rework once we talk impersonally by our gadgets. The funniest second in Jonathan Spector’s comedy “Eureka Day” is the dwell chat that goes berserk throughout an elementary college city corridor convened to debate vaccination coverage after a mumps outbreak. Democracy hilariously breaks down when avatars are unleashed on one another. Uncensored vitriol, it seems, will not be a conduit to compromise and consensus.
Gunderson and Harrison are looking forward to see how AI is perhaps super-charging our disembodiment. To anybody paying consideration, enterprise as standard is not an possibility. The very foundation of our self-understanding is on the road. However who higher than artists to fearlessly maintain the mirror as much as an ever-more digitalized human nature?
