We Are Your Robots: Do Androids Dream of Electric Guitars?

Vito Dieterle, Ian Riggs, Ethan Lipton, and Eben Levy in We Are Your Robots. Photo: HanJie Chow.

As more and more plays turn their sights on the singularity, Theatre for a New Audience is distinguishing itself as a place where artificial intelligence receives particularly intelligent dramatic treatment. Last year, Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer saw its creator—and only flesh-and-blood performer—unfold a subtle, meticulous, deeply human marvel onstage, at the expense of the real and unnerving bots in the room with her, over the course of just 45 minutes. Now, in a svelte and no less compelling 80, We Are Your Robots, a co-production with Rattlestick Theater, is here to find out whether androids dream of electric guitars. Like Dorsen, its playwright, Ethan Lipton, is onstage for the duration of the show. Unlike Dorsen’s creation, Lipton’s compact, tuneful jewel of a play seems charmingly analog: No algorithms are whirring in the background, and the show is essentially a live concept album interspersed with patter, as Lipton and his three bandmates—yes, they’re really a band—jam and swing to a whole variety of genre-hopping original songs (composed by the group with always clever lyrics by Lipton, the score conjures up a little Tom Waits here, a little They Might Be Giants there, a little Cake and Randy Newman over there). Look at it another way though, and there’s not a human in sight. On their glowing, 1960s-TV-special pedestals, in their natty gray suits and black ties like so many Elvis Costello replicants, Lipton and his band aren’t playing people. They are our robots.

“Good evening, and welcome to our demonstration,” says a serene Siri-esque voiceover as the show begins. “We believe that musical robots, with their sensitivity to vibration and their gift for gaining access to the human heart, are uniquely positioned to empower people to fulfill their objectives. Do you know what your objectives are?” No one’s onstage yet, but the tone has already been expertly established. We’re going to be doing a lot of laughing — specifically of the kind where you’ve got one hand to your forehead and are sort of half-wincing while looking down into your own lap. No, Siri (Alexa, Jane, HAL, Clippy), I do not know what my objectives are. I am a walking chaos Muppet barely held together by egg-and-cheese bagels and British comfort TV. But thanks for asking.

When our robots appear, they do so with a bop. “What do you want, my human friends, what do you want?” sings Lipton, as Eben Levy (guitars), Ian Riggs (standup bass), and Vito Dieterle (sax) take their places on Lee Jellinek’s whimsically retro set — the band is backed by an enormous scenery robot of the beep-boop variety, its arms huge tubes of flexy ducting, its looming, affectless rectangle of a face a ready receptacle for Katherine Freer’s projections. Down below, the musicians come off as its progeny, especially once Lipton Bot introduces us to his Grandpa Morrie, a sentient and arguably senile Roomba. Musically, all Morrie’s boys are aces, and when the Siri-v.o. describes Lipton’s frontman style as “amateur therapist,” she’s underselling him. Lipton Bot is unhurried and as soothing as chamomile, with a hint of basset hound around the eyebrows and an attentive tenderness that, impressively, never slips cheaply toward the sinister. This robot is programmed for sincerity and support. He’s here—as is all technology, he contends—to help us achieve our goals. The question is, what are those?

Like all questions at the center of deep-thinking plays, it’s a problem that can feel deceptively manageable at one moment and crushing the next. The trick of We Are Your Robots is that it ambles with us, patiently and with a song on its lips, right up to the edge of the abyss, and we’re delighted to make the trip, paying only sporadic attention to the direction in which we’re headed. “I think”—says Lipton Bot, quoting Noam Chomsky after finishing a heady, jazzy little number about the unknowable subjectivity of consciousness called “To Be a Bat”—“an objective observer, from Mars let’s say, looking at the human species, would conclude that they’re an evolutionary error, that they’re designed in such a way that leads them to destroy themselves.”

The first time we hear these words, they’re almost tossed off — unsettling, yes, but quickly brushed aside. “But come on, that’s Chomsky,” Lipton Bot assures us lightly, as if he’s reestablishing the mood at a family holiday where that one uncle has just gone on the inevitable political rant. “He doesn’t have a rocketship or a billion dollars, don’t listen to him.” But the same quotation is going to circle back around in We Are Your Robots, and, like Saturn, when it makes its return, it’s a real Sunday punch. Lipton knows that it’s always your own face inside Darth Vader’s helmet. His bot’s central assertion—that artificial intelligence systems are really only designed to help humans get the things we want—never wavers. It’s those desires, our own essences, that might turn out to be monstrous.

Our robots aren’t going to leave us at the pit, though — at least not this time. As playwright, Lipton offers a gentle hand to pull us back again. His is the kind of clear-eyed hope that has less to do with positivity than with uncertainty, “the crowning achievement,” says his robot, “of human evolution.” He’s not being ironic, either. “Think about how much of your life is spent not knowing,” Lipton Bot encourages us. “Think about how central a role doubt plays in your decision-making … But what happens when someone who’s overconfident makes a mistake? They can’t process the data, they have no use for it. Whereas, if you’ve been programmed to be uncertain, if you’ve been given the gift of doubt, then you can find a use for the data from just about any mistake, and in that paradigm, screwing up is how you become a better human.” In case you’re worried that the earnestness is going to continue unchecked for a bit too long, the band is right there with a winking dose of ennui in the next song, a jazz tune in which Lipton Bot croons, “I am actually deeply ambivalent about everything … but you.” (For any fans of the Real Tuesday Weld out there, the song is a neat little companion piece for this deadpan banger.)

Under the steady, unaffected hand of Leigh Silverman (a director who can seem as tireless as a robot; I get worried about whether she sleeps), We Are Your Robots skips elegantly back and forth between profound curiosity and endearing hilarity. A simple, startlingly beautiful “translation” of the plaintive warbling of Humpback whales almost brought me to tears, while a duet between Lipton Bot and Grandpa Morrie (“I’m More Myself”) is every bit as irresistible as “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” Less adorable but even funnier are some of Lipton Bot’s early assurances to us about what makes him a capable processor and replicator of human emotion. After all, he’s read every Wikipedia entry there is, “as well as every digitized novel — except for My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård, which I hear is great.” He’s also able to “navigate serious moral dilemmas”: “I know, for example, that if I were your friend, and I saw you in a stage play, that afterward, when greeting you on the street, my assignment would be to tell you that I loved it.” That laugh didn’t go into my lap; pretty sure the whole theater heard that one.

We Are Your Robots is at Theatre for a New Audience through December 8.