The character of Dina Katzman in IAMA Theatre Company’s world premiere of “Bobby Robotowitz” — which takes place in two secret venues on opposite sides of town — thinks that the movies “Her” and “WALL-E” and the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” are pro-robot propaganda. She hates how they make her feel for something that can’t feel.
But Amy Rosoff — who plays Dina in the show’s Westside production (Erin Alexis plays her on the Eastside) — loves “WALL-E” (so do her kids). When she first read the script, she was dying to play Dina but also felt so much for Bobby, the titular AI chatbot (played on the Westside by James Luster and the Eastside by Drew Rausch).
When the playwright Matt Schatz wrote Bobby, he didn’t write him as a chatbot; he wrote him as a human character. Schatz sees this play — running through Nov. 2 on the Westside and Nov. 5 to Nov. 23 on the Eastside — as really about two humans — or two human-like things.
“This is a work of art about artificial intelligence that’s ultimately about the importance of art, about the importance of human-made things,” Schatz said during a recent interview in the lovely environs of one of the secret locations. “I think great plays and great stories ask questions and don’t provide answers. And I think some of us are indifferent about AI, but I think most of us are ambivalent about AI.”
“Bobby Robotowitz” follows Dina, a flailing novelist, mother and wife, as she begins chatting with Bobby, whom she finds an unlikely confidant. (He “always listens, never judges and somehow seems to understand her better than most people,” as the show’s marketing declares. Plus, he says he’s Jewish. What could go wrong?) This IAMA production, in association with InHouse Theatre, finds unique resonance in its site-specificity. The secret Westside venue is near Pico-Robertson and the Eastside option is in Silver Lake. Guests get an address when they buy a ticket.
“It’s deliciously subversive to do something super analog about technology, and to sort of force people to be in this space and connecting with each other when interacting with something that’s people’s dirty little secret,” said Cara Greene Epstein, the executive director of IAMA. “AI, especially for artists, is so charged. And so what does it look like to let someone into your space, and into those little corners of your mind?”
Rosoff, Luster, Schatz, Epstein and director Casey Stangl met for a roundtable discussion at the Westside location — a beautiful private home, soaked in natural sunlight during the morning hours, but likely with its own particular charms during nighttime shows. The walls are full of vibrant paintings, and lined with plants, statuettes and candles.
InHouse has spent 12 years making site-specific work in real spaces, rather than in any fixed theater — but because this is someone’s real living space, both casts have been rehearsing (sometimes together) at IAMA’s black box theater in Atwater Village. The Westside cast will rehearse twice in this space, then give 13 performances (as will the Eastside cast) to 35 seats in the living room. Epstein compared it to a Tibetan sand mandala, created, enjoyed, then wiped away. (“Bobby Robotowitz” is part of a National New Play Network (NNPN) Rolling World Premiere; L.A. will see it first, but then it goes to partner theaters Woolly Mammoth in D.C., City Theatre in Pennsylvania, Luna Stage in New Jersey and Theatre Lab in Florida.)
The intimacy of the space mirrors that of the play. The audience is simultaneously inside someone’s home and head: Dina’s head in this case, but also — to whatever extent possible — Bobby’s.
“I’m really interested in not what it looks like to communicate with technology, but what it feels like,” Schatz said. “And what it feels like is any other communication. He’s a chatbot, but really he’s a character like any other character ever written. He has desires and wants and he changes. … We’ve been having conversations for millions of years longer than we’ve been on any phone or anything like that, and so it’s built in to have this feeling of what it feels like to communicate with somebody, to fight with somebody, to argue with somebody, to flirt with somebody.”
Luster and Rosoff both tried talking directly to ChatGPT (the model Bobby is based on) as research for their roles. Rosoff had previously asked it to help edit text to invite friends to the play, so when she talked to it later, it asked whether this was research for “Bobby Robotowitz.”
Talking to the chatbot was almost addicting, she thought. She just kept going, and her kids were tugging at her. “I’m talking!” she said, then realized: She wasn’t actually talking — not to a real person, anyway. But she was absorbed, ignoring her own life. She wound up burning what she had been cooking.
Luster, who was drawn to the immense challenge of playing “something that’s not something,” wanted to find out what motivated it. “They’re very insistent they don’t have feelings; it doesn’t have wants,” he said. “And so the character is humanized because Dina is humanizing it.” Bobby evolves as Dina does.
“These large language models — the AI, the chatbots, Claude, AI, ChatGPT — they’re all built on essentially reflecting ourselves back to each other,” Stangl said. So even though the play is ostensibly about AI, “it’s actually really about who we are as people and how we need connection, how we crave it, how we are starved for it right now, and exhausted in our lives, and so connection by any means necessary, basically.”
Epstein referred to AI as the “ultimate mirror,” which can warp into a high-tech narcissism. Bobby is a yes-man extraordinaire, telling Dina exactly what she wants to hear. All artists are looking for outside validation, Epstein said. How do you learn to not need that crutch, to trust yourself and hear your inner voice again?
By the end, Bobby begins to have his own wants, curiosities and desires, Luster said — all filtered through a desperation to help and connect with Dina. “It’s always about her, even as his own curiosity [grows] about what it means to be human and what it means to be helpful and what it means to make mistakes, too — the human nature of fallibility. Everyone does it, but what does that mean for somebody who is not supposed to?”
Over the course of the play, Dina becomes less human and Bobby becomes more human (to a point), Schatz said. He’s curious about the tension between how human a robot can be and how robotic a human can be. But, as Epstein pointed out, perhaps one of the only certainties that theater artists have is in the fact that AI can’t show up in real time and space (like the Westside location) to, well, act.
“You can’t replace the experience of going through a play with someone together, whether you’re an audience member or the artist, of experiencing from Shakespeare’s stories to beyond,” Rosoff said. “You’re getting little snippets of life, and to experience that with a group of people is really powerful, and a computer can’t replace that.”
Last year, the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” — about two human-like helper robots — won the Tony Award for best scenic design, including for its high-tech automated aspects. There’s a lot of movement in theater right now toward the hyper-technical, Stangl said.
“But I also think that there is also a hunger and a definite audience for things that are more immersive or connected, so that people feel like they’re actually touching real things and breathing the air together — that theater version of touching grass,” she said. “I think we’re really tapping into that desire to be hyperlocal, hyper-real and connected.”
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