It has become passé for fringe theater to reinterpret classic works in new, often bizarre ways - The Importance of Being Earnest performed by dominatrices, Death of a Salesman in a disco. But on February 8 in New York City, the underground theatrical superstars Les Freres Corbusier premiere the first production of Hedda Gabler in which half of the major roles are played by robots. Not humans in funny suits, but walking, talking machines performing live onstage. It's titled, naturally, Heddatron.
Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the show's producer, has an unassuming air - you wouldn't expect him to be responsible for this kind of craziness. And over lunch recently in Union Square, he makes a convincing case that his approach to the play is anything but mad. "Hedda Gabler, of all Ibsen's plays, is about transcendence, the desire to escape this world and the characters' inability to escape the roles society shapes for them," he says, looking down at his vegetarian chili, then back up as though it had spoken to him. "It made perfect sense: robots."
Hedda Gabler, which many consider Henrik Ibsen's masterpiece, tells the story of a deeply conflicted woman whose world comes crashing down when she's faced with the success of a former lover. The resulting tensions between loyalty, social position, and her own heart drive the action. Heddatron is considerably less linear. It bounces from robots enacting a doomed staging of Hedda Gabler, to student book reports on Ibsen's plays, to a mother in Ypsilanti, Michigan, whom the robots abduct to star in their production, to Ibsen's house, where the playwright lives with his overbearing wife and what the script terms a kitchen slut. The 19th-century Swedish playwright August Strindberg also appears, carrying a sack of used condoms and writing plays with a Sharpie that's glued to his crotch.
Heddatron features some humans, but the robots will rule the stage when the play opens at the HERE Arts Center on Sixth Avenue. They're being assembled by The Botmatrix, a cooperative of alpha-geek graduates of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Onstage, the actor-droids will live in Robotforest, a wonderland straight out of Tron, made from a wall of configurable LEDs that blink and pulse. As the play progresses, the thespioids will gradually take over the stage, so that by the final curtain, all the major roles except Hedda - Judge Brack, Eilert, Berta, Aunt Julie - will be performed by remote-controlled robots. The bots' lines will be delivered using prerecorded text to speech. Some will be humanoid, others small and wheeled. Their designs are inspired by robots of yesteryear, like Elektro and Sparko, spokesrobots for Westinghouse Electric in the 1930s.
All of which suggests that the performance might be - dare we say? - robotic. It might be difficult for machine actors to convey the full dimensions of the human condition. But Elizabeth Meriwether's strange script cuts to the heart of Ibsen's story: A woman chained up in her own life struggles to break free of social programming. That struggle is mirrored by the robots, who attempt to escape their own programming and achieve true AI - self-awareness. Just as Hedda rails against a world that can't hear her, the robots represent potential that one day may be unleashed.
The human actors in the play have already been cast, so the production team won't have the chance to audition them with the robots. Not that the humans would mind. "I've auditioned with great people and with terrible people," says one of the actors. "You always want to look better than the people you read with. I can work with a robot."
- Mike Daisey
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An Ibsen Classic, Now With Robots!
