So what role can a robot play on stage, in a narrative production? We’re attempting to cast robots as humans in Brighton Beach Memoirs. What other possibilities are there?

There’s lots of precedent, back to the genesis of the term robot in Karel Capek’s play RUR - Rossum’s Universal Robots. Robots, in a sense, were born on stage, in 1920. (Interestingly, the term robot, a variation on the Czech word robota, labor, was apparently not invented by Karel but suggested to him by his brother Josef, a cubist painter.)

RUR is still unusual, in a way. The robots are not human and yet complex, potentially sympathetic, morally ambiguous. It’s been pretty much downhill since then for robots in popular narrative, including film and fiction.

With some exceptions (such as Asimov’s positronic robots, or perhaps Philip K. Dick’s androids) they have played accessory roles, drastically simplified and mostly superfluous.

Here are the most common roles for a robot:

Servant (as robot)
Comic relief (as robot)
Antagonist (as robot)

The role of robots in theater is even more limited, perhaps because of the limitations of representing alternative realities on stage. For the most part, robots are complex accessories, or semi-autonomous puppets, rather than real characters.

In our experiment, we are doing something a bit different. We are casting robots as humans. It’s a kind of sleight of hand, a basically impossible act simulated through misdirection. But that’s a perfectly legitimate artistic strategy in theater. We’re really treating robots as just another bunch of (potentially) talented performers. Remember Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie … “I can be taller. I can be shorter. I can be different.” Why can’t a robot play a human being? It’s just casting. (Thanks to Liz Dreyer, our dramaturg, for that reference.)

Of course, the whole experiment will probably fail. BTW, we are still waiting for approval from Samuel French.