Seinendan Theater Company + Osaka University Robot Theater Project Written and directed by Oriza Hirata (review)

Essays like Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” and Edward Gordon Craig’s “The Actor and the Über-marionette” have suggested that skillful automata might productively replace and surpass the human actor. Robot Theater Project, a collaboration that employs both robots and human actors, provided an opportunity to evaluate these modernist theories. Beyond a simple evaluation of robots’ acting abilities, however, the stage presence of automata raised significant questions about theatricality and empathy. Provocatively, this evening demonstrated that perhaps the qualities we typically associate with good or effective acting—presence, responsiveness, emotional availability—may, in fact, prove ancillary. Although the success of these pieces necessitated understated performances from the human actors and particular design choices (such as easily navigable sets and low lighting) to establish the commonality between person and machine, these automata excited sympathy to an equivalent, or perhaps even greater, degree than their human counterparts. Their effectiveness in performance suggests that mimetic engagement on the part of the audience may owe less to actorly skill than to our collective instinct to attribute human feeling—even to decidedly nonhuman performers. Whether these two short plays confused the boundaries between human and robot or explicitly marked them, both pieces relied upon the audience’s capacity to create empathic bonds with lifeless objects.

Robot Theater Project comprised two brief one-act plays, Sayonara and I, Worker, both written and directed by Oriza Hirata and each designed to demonstrate the robots’ capacity to elicit emotion. In Sayonara, a dying young woman (Bryerly Long) talks with her android caregiver, an eerily lifelike automaton called Geminoid F. In I, Worker, a young married couple interacts with two robot servants, one of whom shares the depressive husband’s desire to retreat from the mandates of working life. Whether the automata appeared human-like (Sayonara) or distinctly mechanical (I, Worker), engaging dialogue between the human actors and their machine counterparts simultaneously both emphasized the differences between person and automaton and blurred those categories.

Drawing on the accessible emotions of imminent death, Sayonara contrasted the relative immortality of an android with the corporeal fragility of the human body, even as it established strong physical resemblances between the two. Lighting designer Shoko Mishima barely illuminated Itaru Sugiyama’s stark set, helping Geminoid F. to appear all the more human in the dim light. Indeed, intermission chatter revealed that many in the audience believed that the android was, in fact, human. Whereas the extreme stillness of Geminoid F.’s body gradually exposed it as mechanical, the human actor (Long) also held her body very still and kept her voice relatively uninflected, the better to mirror her caregiver. Despite their physical similarities, pathos stemmed from the concrete differences between them: while the young woman would soon die, the android could live indefinitely so long as humans could repair it.

Yet, even as I grieved for the young woman, I also felt myself worrying that the android would feel lonely once she died. A coda confirmed this anxiety. Long after the death of the young woman, Geminoid F. has been newly assigned to Fukushima because, as a human worker (Hiroshi Ota) says, “Many people died there, but we can’t go there, and we can’t recite poetry to them. So I’m asking you to do it.” When the worker first arrived, however, he found the android malfunctioning: “Maybe it’s because I was alone for a long time,” the android said. Sayonara both highlighted the differences between machine and person (the android will not be affected by radiation; the android can love indefinitely) and confirmed our desire for commonality. Elsewhere, the young woman asked the android if she liked her former client. “Androids do not like,” replies Geminoid F. Like us, the young woman wants to believe that she and the android share similar habits of mind and can participate in shared emotional and cognitive evaluations.

Geminoid...