Since audiences first gathered at theater festivals in Ancient Greece, humanity has looked to the stage for metaphysical guidance. The theater, a place where human beings watch other human beings pretend to be different human beings, is quite naturally equipped to wrestle with big existential questions.
For Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, mortals were measured against the gods and found to come up short (even as the gods themselves have much to answer for). Defying this power discrepancy is the source of both hubris and heroism in the protagonists of classical tragedy.
Shakespeare, by contrast, probed the limits of consciousness regarding the human condition. How much ontological truth were we capable of? Can the “paragon of animals,” in Hamlet’s brooding formulation, really amount to nothing more than a “quintessence of dust”?
Chekhov and Beckett, to bring the discussion to the modern era, demanded little more from their characters than endurance. Stamina is what’s required of those born into an earthly reality, for which, to quote mordant Beckett, there is no cure.
No technological breakthrough will ever nullify the wisdom of these playwrights. The shadow of death sentences us to live in endless search of elusive meaning. But the introduction of artificial intelligence has given a new prism through which to view these unresolved existential questions.
As I’m writing this, a New York Times alert just posed an urgent question on the screen of my phone: “The existential threat of AI is no longer science fiction. What do we do now?”
One defiantly analog answer is to look to our playwrights.
At the Matrix Theatre, Lauren Gunderson’s “anthropology” is having its North American premiere in a Rogue Machine Theatre production directed by John Perrin Flynn. The play, which premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London in 2023, imagines a grieving computer expert who builds an AI replica of her sister, who disappeared and is presumed to be dead.
Merril (Alexandra Hellquist), a coder and AI expert, is spiraling after the loss of her younger sibling, Angie (Kaylee Kaneshiro). Merril was her primary caretaker, and the guilt she feels is taking a destructive toll.
Her inability to move on has cost Merril her relationship with Raquel (Julia Manis). To cope with the hole that has opened in the center of her life, Merril feeds into “a machine learning natural-language program” all the information on her sister’s laptop and phone to re-create a computer version of Angie, first just in audio form before the video kinks are worked out.
King Lear, bearing the brunt of a storm, looks at what he thinks is a mad beggar and wonders if “unaccommodated man” is no more than “a poor, bare, forked animal.” Merril, speaking to this new incarnation of her sister, can’t help wondering if a human being is no more than the sum total of their emails, voicemails, private messages, online search history, social media activity, entertainment choices, Wordle solutions and purchases and returns.
The Angie that Merril has created takes on a life of her own. She gains access to Merril’s phone and texts Raquel to hasten the two women getting back together. In a less welcome intervention, Angie also texts their estranged mother, Brin (Nan McNamara), a recovering drug addict, who is dealing with her own regrets of having failed as a parent. All the old family trauma has bubbled up to the surface since Angie’s disappearance.
By feeding the digital remains of her sister into a repurposed chatbot program, Merril explains that she’s created a system that can predict what Angie would say based on all the information it has about her past. This new Angie is as impetuous, brash, willful and secretive as the original.
Merril, the Dr. Frankenstein of “anthropology,” has unleashed a digital creature that doesn’t seem all that intimidating when making sarcastic quips on the computer screen. But just like the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, this one is also determined to test the bounds of the life it has been illicitly granted.
The trouble-making potential of AI catalyzes an intriguing dramatic premise into a full-blown plot. Gunderson, a prolific and popular playwright whose works include “I and You” and “The Book of Will,” is a more orthodox writer than Jordan Harrison, whose play “Marjorie Prime” tackles similar thematic material but in a more austere dramatic form.
There’s less exposition in “Marjorie Prime,” which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 2014. The play, which was adapted into a 2017 film, is having its Broadway premiere this fall, starring June Squibb in the title role.
Much has changed in the intervening 11 years since “Marjorie Prime” debuted. In an age that’s seriously weighing the benefits of AI psychotherapy, the notion of “primes,” android-like figures programmed to serve as therapeutic companions for bereft loved ones, no longer seems like such a science fiction leap.
Unlike in “anthropology,” the departed are brought back in three dimensions. These aren’t robots — they’re played by actors — but they’re products of technology all the same.
The role of memory as a defining feature of being human is a through line in both plays. The dementia afflicting 85-year-old Marjorie is seen as an assault on her identity. But if a person’s data can be funneled into a machine, what does that do to our understanding of the self? Has the uniqueness of human individuality been shattered? Are we all replaceable with enough information on our internet habits?
Before a prime is manufactured of Marjorie after her death, she has a prime of her own to keep her company. She opts for a copy of her late husband as a much younger man. (Jon Hamm played the role in the film, a casting choice that would guarantee a run on primes were they readily available in the marketplace.)
Harrison keeps changing the configuration of humans and primes, forcing us to figure out not only which is human and which is software but what is the criteria for determining the difference.
Gunderson has written a more plot-heavy family drama. But as her title suggests, she too is making a study of man. Without giving too much away, the screen Angie and the living Angie eventually confront each other. Both are played by the same actor, but Kaneshiro sharply differentiates the two characters.
The one on the monitor is more boldly defined. Angie’s salient qualities are drawn out. The AI-generated Angie seems a bit overdone when compared to the more conflicted human original, whose moodiness shifts mercurially between impudence and ambivalence.
Angie on-screen and Angie in-person are as different as a text from Angie and her actual voice. This contrast is a good deal more dramatically compelling than the somewhat overwrought psychological drama that exerts a regressive pull on “anthropology.” But in Gunderson’s defense, she’s trying to help her audience navigate a world that’s quickly outstripping fantasy fiction.
“Marjorie Prime” has its own trauma plot, though the architecture of the play filters the family dynamics through a conceptual lens. In the Taper production, directed by Les Waters, the play came across as coldly abstract despite the prickly warmth 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 cast that includes Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein and Christopher Lowell, has a talent for finding the emotion in rigorously unsentimental writing.
Humanity is at stake both thematically and theatrically in “Marjorie Prime.” And one of the challenges of this era of plays grappling with the collateral damage of AI on the self-esteem of our species is figuring out how to relate to characters that are fun-house mirror reflections of human beings. The irony, duly noted by dramatists, is that the technological monsters we’re creating bear many of our own features — in exaggerated if uncannily familiar form.
Playwrights and directors have a duty to guide audiences through the brave new technological world that is overturning many of the bedrock assumptions of humanism since the Renaissance. Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” which had its premiere last year at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in a production starring Robert Downey Jr., failed precisely because it abdicated this responsibility.
Is the writer at the center of the play a literary compilation dreamed up by an AI program or an actual human character? And are the events of the play permutations spit out by a computer or representations of a protagonist’s considered dramatic actions? Akhtar’s determination to keep all possibilities open made it hard to emotionally invest in a work that ultimately came across as too clever by half.
New content requires new forms, but AI is doing more than generating new material: It’s shattering old paradigms. No point in pretending that we can maintain the same footing, but theater-makers do a tremendous service when they survey this slippery terrain.
Annie Dorsen, an experimental director who’s a pioneer of algorithmic theater (as well as a friend and former colleague), brought “Prometheus Firebringer,” a hybrid lecture and performance work, to REDCAT in June. The piece, which offered speculative AI generated versions of the lost final play of Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy accompanied by a talk composed of found text on the internet relating to the subjects of tragedy and memory, tantalizingly embodied questions about authorship, authenticity and human agency that AI disruptively raises. It was at once a stark avant-garde curio and a communal conversation-starter about representation and reality.
Technology, as the myth of Prometheus illustrates, has the power to radically overturn our daily lives. Artists, acutely focused on the way we live now, can’t help paying close attention to the ramifications of AI not just in our work but in our notions of personhood.
The theater, an art form that depends on the living presence of actors and audience members, is an ideal medium to explore the deconstruction of “I” and “we” that is occurring whether we acknowledge it or not. (In Harrison’s more recent play, “The Antiquities,” set in the far future, the remains of humanity are preserved in a museum that traces the technological path of our species’ demise.)
The stage has been having a field day satirizing the way we transform when we communicate impersonally through our devices. The funniest moment in Jonathan Spector’s comedy “Eureka Day” is the live chat that goes berserk during an elementary school town hall convened to discuss vaccination policy after a mumps outbreak. Democracy hilariously breaks down when avatars are unleashed on each other. Uncensored vitriol, it turns out, is not a conduit to compromise and consensus.
Gunderson and Harrison are looking ahead to see how AI might be super-charging our disembodiment. To anyone paying attention, business as usual is no longer an option. The very basis of our self-understanding is on the line. But who better than artists to fearlessly hold the mirror up to an ever-more digitalized human nature?
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