Darren Criss stood up, fast asleep, his head heavy. When he awoke, he reverse body rolled, slowly turned his head from side to side, then brushed his teeth, mechanically moving his toothbrush — left, right, left — like a cartoon character.
But this was no cartoon come to life (that would be “Boop!,” playing a block away). This was a scene from the Broadway musical “Maybe Happy Ending” in which Criss and Helen J Shen play Oliver and Claire, android attendant robots called Helperbots.
Playing a character onstage comes with its own process of world building. But playing a nonhuman character requires a different — or additional — calculation. Where is a robot’s center of gravity?
As Claire, a Helperbot 5 with a defective battery (and heavy dose of sarcasm), Shen moves as a human would. As Oliver, a Helperbot 3, an earlier model, Criss moves stiffly, his reflexes stilted. He’s all elbows and knees and sharp lines. Her limbs move in bell curves. The challenge of playing an aging robot has been a field day for Criss, an opportunity to draw upon his formal training in physical theater.
“In many ways I joke that Oliver is my excuse to overact for two hours,” Criss said, adding, “the joke being how beep boop bop are we going here without it feeling too, frankly, ridiculous.”
As humans, signals are sent from our brains to blink, stretch or bend. But a Helperbot’s physicality was a blank canvas. Though “Maybe Happy Ending” doesn’t have an official choreographer, the director Michael Arden doubled as one. (The show earned 10 Tony Award nominations, including for best new musical, Arden’s direction and Criss’s performance.) Together, Criss, Shen and Arden created their robotic anatomy from the inside out.
As they prepared for the Broadway production, Arden left Criss a voice note asking him to think about Oliver’s operating system. “Like, ‘Where does all the information come from?’ is where I kind of wanted to start,” Arden said.
“And that’s kind of how we began,” he added, “thinking about the joints and the musculature and what was underneath the skin of this robot.”
Criss and Shen also met over Zoom with Moni Yakim, a former movement teacher for actors at Juilliard. (Arden called him a “legend in mime, mask and movement.”)
But much of the “beep boop” was borne from Criss’s education in commedia dell’arte, or Italian physical comedy. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he studied abroad for a semester at the performing arts school Accademia dell’Arte, in Arezzo, Italy.
“I’ve never played any part where I could really put this specific interest and training to any apparent use,” he said. “So I went ham on trying to utilize that skill set that has just been sitting dormant.”
That passion was on full display in an interview last month in which Criss geeked out over geishas (“this sort of code of conduct that is based in constantly signaling deference and subordination”); the Disney animator Glen Keane (“the king of animated facial nuance”); the medieval Italian comedic servant Arlecchino (“the kind of ne’er do well fool”) and European clown lineages; and the Kabuki character type Aragoto (“a very bombastic, over-expressive performance”).
Together, this swirl creates what he called his particular “cocktail” for Oliver.
As older models, both Oliver and Claire have been discarded — or “retired,” in the parlance of their manufacturer and former owners — and now live out their remaining days in tiny apartments on the outskirts of Seoul. Much of their movement is confined to small studio-like boxes.
And, like all Helperbots, Oliver — whose hermetic tendencies were in part inspired by extreme recluses in Japan known as hikikomori — and Claire are seemingly physically identical to humans. At first.
Oliver sits perfectly upright, his spine straight as a board. When he goes to pick something up, he hinges from his hips and bows forward. When Oliver walks, his chest puffs out slightly as his feet shuffle forward, or bends his knees at right angles in a kind of soft marching motion. But he also subtly expresses longing and disappointment, even self-consciousness.
“I sort of have to translate, curate, aggregate, organize, maximize,” Criss said, and “offer something that is going to be accessible and effective.”
When Oliver’s hands are not in use, Criss keeps his fists closed, slightly in front of his hip bones: a neutral resting position, deferential.
“The secret here,” Criss said, grinning, “is doing this answers the age old question for performers, which is, ‘What should I do with my hands?’”
Oliver’s disposition is rigid, but he has a childlike wonder and is eager to be of service. Claire’s is more fluid. She can twist a screwdriver. Her fingers are dexterous, her neck flexible. Helperbot 5s were designed to appear uncannily humanlike, but without the human tics. (A robot has no need, for example, to nervously pick her fingernails or tuck her hair behind her ear.)
In an intimate scene in which the pair dance, Claire’s arm is bent, her fingers curled into a ballet hand. On top of her hand, Oliver lays his fist. In another, their charging magnets stick to each other as they kiss, Shen said.
“It just becomes part of the given circumstances of how their bodies work,” she added. Moving with the magnets, the charger cords, the battery indication on their wrists, she said, “all of these are languages that we’re trying to introduce to help tell the story better, to make the audience understand how this robot could be breaking down.”
In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green wrote, “Under cover of sci-fi whimsy, it sneaks in a totally original human heartbreaker.” He called the performances “daring enough to tell the robot story yet not so extreme as to obscure the human one.”
“The show is highly choreographed, actually,” said Arden, who wanted to ensure that Oliver and Claire weren’t anticipating their responses the way a human might, and that, like true robots, any movement was purely economical.
“There’s a cleanness and a blankness to how they approached each moment,” he said, “which allowed them to truly listen to each other in such a beautiful way. And I think that’s what people are responding to.”
That resonance might help explain the show’s remarkable turnaround from an underdog original musical to Tony-nominated hit with a growing fandom. Though delivered by robots, the messages — to savor what precious, fleeting time we have with one another, to move through the world with a sense of awe — couldn’t be more sentient.
“Computers,” Criss said, “are a perfect analogy to the human experience.”
Rachel Sherman reports on culture and the arts for The Times.
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