NYRSF February 2013 Issue 294 Read online

  ISSUE #294 February 2013

  Volume 25, No.6 ISSN #1052-9438 ESSAYS

  Photoessay: Boskone 50, Boston, Massachusetts, February 2013

  JeFF Stumpo: Until Someone Loses an I: The Deconstruction of “self” in Borges and Lovecraft

  Mike Barrett: Iron Angels & Annihilators: John Morressy’s Novels of Heroic Fantasy

  Damien Broderick: The Mellor’s Tale

  Tom Easton: A Post-Steampunk Manifesto

  Dave Drake: Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter

  Andrés Lomeña: Ways of Reading Fantasy: An Interview with Farah Mendlesohn

  Victor Grech: Star Trek’s Picard: Humanity’s Conscience

  REVIEWS

  Karel Čapek’s R. U. R. and Richard Manly’s The Truth Quotient, reviewed by Jen Gunnels

  Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner, reviewed by Damien Broderick

  PLUS

  A glimpse of futures past futures, screed, and an editorial.

  Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors.

  Alex Donald, Webmaster; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor; Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.

  Staff: Ann Crimmins, Jen Gunnels, and Lisa Padol.

  Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty, M’jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, and Eugene Surowitz.

  Published monthly by Burrowing Wombat Press, 206 Valentine Street, Yonkers NY 10704-1814

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  Copyright © 2013 Burrowing Wombat Press.

  Boskone 50, Boston, Massachusetts, February 2013

  The Bar Scene

  Charles Stross & plush Cthulhu

  Stories that Changed Everything panel: Paul Di Filippo, Michael Swanwick,

  James Patrick Kelly, David G. Hartwell & Fred Lerner

  R. U. R. by Karel Čapek, adapted by Lee Eric Shackleford, directed by Valentina Fratti

  produced by Resonance Ensemble, featuring Chris Ceraso, Brad Makarowski, and Christine Bullen

  Beckett Theatre, New York City

  The Truth Quotient by Richard Manly, directed by Eric Parnes

  produced by Resonance Ensemble, featuring Jarel Davidow, Shaun Bennet Wilson, and Maxwell Zener

  Beckett Theatre, New York City

  reviewed by Jen Gunnels

  If people follow me on Facebook or Twitter, they know that in the last few months I’ve been mulling over science fiction theatre as a form and practice, how it works (or doesn’t) depending on what you’re looking at. I won’t say that I’ve come to any definitive conclusions, but the thought process has yielded fruit—some of which is tasty and useful. Foremost are notions of what makes performance great and what makes sf great and where, exactly, might these two intersect. As if in answer to my plea for useful examples, Resonance Ensemble has produced two plays in repertory, R. U. R. and The Truth Quotient, which admirably assist in illustrating certain key points.

  Resonance Ensemble pairs older “classic” plays with modern work examining the, well, resonance between the two. They do this through discussions after the performance led by relevant scholars and guests specializing in their seasonal theme, in this case “Connecting Circuits.” While they use the term “in repertory,” they do so in a newer sense of the word. Traditionally, doing plays in repertory would involve multiple actors doing two or more plays. These actors would play different parts across the offerings. Not so today. While it can mean the same thing, more often it means that a single company does two plays simultaneously (often alternating evenings) within a single season using two separate casts. Such is the case here. Normally, I would review each play as a separate entity, but since artistic director Eric Parness has seen fit to do these plays together, I feel obliged to examine them together.

  R. U. R. will be familiar to many sf aficionados. The plot may be as well-known to them as Macbeth or Hamlet, but for those who aren’t acquainted with it, it’s the work that originated the word “robot.” In a nutshell, “R. U. R.” is short for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” a company founded by Rossum on an isolated island. In the original, the “robots” are organic beings more akin to clones than the mechanized beings we think of these days. The inheritors of the company make robots for menial labor, freeing humanity from base work. They get greedy, and soon the robots outnumber the humans (who have stopped having children). The robots come to realize that they’re being oppressed. Rebellion, eradication of human vermin . . . all the ingredients for robot apocalypse. Essentially the play is the progenitor of The Terminator and The Matrix. Now, if you haven’t read or seen it—go do so! It’s a classic; you should know it.

  The play premiered in Prague in 1921, then in New York in 1922. After the play’s publication in English in 1923, such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton focused on the robots, but Čapek was not specifically addressing thoughts on robotics. At the time, The Saturday Review quoted Čapek as saying, “For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots.” Perhaps this comment indicates a greater concern for the working class he was trying to represent, but it may also indicate a proto-examination of post-humanism and questioning where the line is drawn both scientifically and humanistically.

  While the script usually needs a certain amount of updating, the choices made in presentation by Lee Eric Shackleford were perplexing. The updates to and choices of language in the adaptation worked very well, but rather than following the chronological structure of Čapek’s script, he chose to frame the narrative as a series of flashbacks, memories of the engineer, Josef Alquist (brilliantly rendered by Chris Ceraso), the only human spared by the robots. This choice diffused most, if not all, of the tension within the play, making it a cerebral exercise in the folly of humanity rather than a presentation of the horrific consequences of scientific hubris. The story also has roots in the golem of Jewish folklore, the most famous being the Golem of Prague. This fact is awkwardly referenced in this updated version of the play but doesn’t connect it to any particulars.

  How to put this? The production was awkward. As if its nature as an older play and a science-fictional one at that, left the artists at a loss. I hate taking people to task, but given Resonance’s mission statement in examining works in tandem (not to mention my dedication to sf theatre in particular), I think it’s important to have your facts straight. Here I think questionable assumptions and misunderstandings played a role in the awkward nature of the production. In fact, director Valentina Fratti makes the statement in a Q&A preview for the show for nytheatre.com (1/2/2013), “R. U. R. . . . is based on the 1920 Czech play that introduced the world to the word ‘robot’ and was a grandfather to all science fiction.”

  Um, no.

  What this tells me is that some pertinent research fell by the wayside. She got one out of three correct: it is the first time the word “robot” comes into the lexicon and with sf context. However, aside from not correctly citing the premiere date (1921, but I’m being a pissy theatre historian here), it is most definitely not the “grandfather to all science fiction.” In fact, that’s not been settled between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Lucien of Samosata’s second century text A True History, and several other candidates. Fratti also neatly disposes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells—who were writi
ng well before Čapek—not to mention the reams of proto-science fiction before them. Besides the fact that Čapek specifically states he wasn’t focusing on the robots, the term “science fiction” appeared in print in 1851, even though Hugo Gernsback is the one usually credited with creating the term. In 1926, he coined the term “scientifiction,” but this changed to “science fiction” around 1929. My point is that all of this is extremely basic information, widely available (shout out to the peeps on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, yo), pertinent to the production, that might have made a difference in the approach.

  The cast gave an adequate performance with a few standouts. Most notably, Chris Ceraso’s Alquist maintained a charming and wise but humble working-man attitude. Mac Brydon gave the impression of having a great deal of fun as the hard-drinking and sexist Dr. Hallemeier. At the same time, Brydon imbued Hallemeier with a hard practicality lacking in the other scientists. This is not to say that the rest of the cast dropped the ball; they did what they could with what they had. But when it came to the science-fictional elements such as reacting to the robots or the actors playing the robots themselves, there was a sense of being at a loss. Only Jane Cortney seemed comfortable with being the robot, Sulla, largely because Cortney tried not to be one of Rossum’s creations, choosing instead to go for the impression of an overly precise and proper human.

  The set design by Jennifer Varbalow had a pleasant Art Deco look to it. Sofa, table, and chairs formed the main acting area at downstage center, while a small table and chairs occupied an area upstage right. Tucked away in the upstage left corner was a drafting table with computers and stools. The soft cream and light brown shades along with the verticality of the pillars delineating the room gave the feeling of wealth and privilege for the humans inhabiting the space. However, at upstage center was a massive silver screen which was exceedingly distracting and tended to overwhelm everything on stage. The screen was only used as an effect twice in the second act to diffuse lights indicating the moment when the robots charge the electrified fence and again when the luckless accountant Busman (an amiably avaricious James Ware) was thrown upon it. The sound effects worked brilliantly, and frankly if properly sold by the actors (maybe with a macabre touch of smoke from below the window) would have been much more effective in conveying the horror and gravity of the situation.

  Updating the robots, a series of models each more radically advanced than the next wasn’t particularly necessary and read as silly, if the tittering from the audience was any indicator. The question within the script is always a question of what rights are to be accorded based on how “alive” a “robot” is, and yes, I get the overt point that it might be easy to determine that an object has no rights if it doesn’t look or act like a human. That said, the initial productions of R. U. R. in Prague, London, and New York made the robots odd but not necessarily overly mechanical, as shown in the original production photos. For the most part, costume designer Brooke Cohn followed a similar route, but the oldest robots were overencumbered with body armor to give a sectional appearance, topped with sleek motorcycle helmets. Scholars in post-humanism and examinations of cyborgs point out that the threat in the mechanical is heightened when these objects blur the lines between technology and ourselves to the point they become difficult to differentiate. The more real the robot/android looks, the more threatening and uncanny it becomes. Such a situation is far more fraught with tension. Given the rate of technologic progress as reflected in Moore’s Law, this would dictate that the robots would easily be updated as quickly as smartphones—they wouldn’t look significantly different except in movement and perhaps surface color/texture.

  This making of “real” robots—that is robots that look overtly robot-y—plays into another major issue with the material on stage. Theatre, try as it might, remains entrenched in realism as a production mode (Tobin Nelhaus would use the term “production strategy”), something I find pretty tiresome. As a result, literal interpretation of nearly every script is the norm, especially when it comes to classics from a period which followed immediately on the heels of realism. Of course a little po-mo meddling occurs, but it never really alters anything significantly. That is not to say that realism and sf don’t mix, since Mac Rogers’s Honeycomb Trilogy proves this amply wrong. Can you hear the “but” coming?

  The end of this particular version of R. U. R. has the robots (thereby the actors) storming the room with ray guns. The humans are left with what for all intents and purposes looks like a toy assault weapon. If the technology is available, then why don’t the humans have better weapons? For that matter, why do the robots need weapons at all? There are supposedly 500+ robot soldiers on the island to exterminate the humans there, who, counting all the workers, are at best outnumbered at least five to one. I don’t know about other people, but the thought of being ripped apart by hand is far more terrifying and horrific than getting shot. There is also the added problem of any weapon being used on stage. It has to look and sound natural, and the actors have to look as if the weapon in their hand is utterly natural. This wasn’t the case here.

  The Truth Quotient, the modern companion piece to R. U. R., is also concerned with the question of reality. What is real and what is true come to the fore in the story of wealthy entrepreneur David (Jarel Davidow). David has purchased extremely sophisticated AIs from Neureál—his first, girlfriend Caprice (Meredith Howard), has been followed by models of his parents (Brian Tom O’Connor and Angelina Fiordellisi). Rachel (Shaun Bennet Wilson), an account executive with Neureál, has been assigned to assist him with transitioning and making certain that David is getting the most out of his “new” family. Enter David’s estranged elder brother, Donald (Maxwell Zener). David and Donald used to be close as kids, bonding in the face of their alcoholic father and disinterested mother, but Donald didn’t know the extent of his brother’s abuse. Thus, David’s impulse is to create the happy family he always imagined but never had.

  Donald, who is dying of cancer, has lied to his brother about his remission and has come to see if he might be able to live with David. Rachel, armed with the vast engines and Internet information available through social network engineering, knows everything about both David and Donald. She also knows that Donald is lying and offers a threat to David’s fragile, new-found happiness and to her account. Donald is appalled by his brother’s AIs and insists that David is deluding himself, but when confronted, David chooses his new family over Donald. Donald leaves, and in the final scene, David opens a box from Donald’s estate, and Rachel interrupts a significant personal moment, diverting it by giving David a “present”—an AI of his now deceased brother.

  The title of the play becomes apparent from an explanation Rachel gives to David when he questions whether or not Caprice actually feels anything, even her love for him. Rachel outlines how young children until age three or four simply don’t lie. They’re very direct in what they want. Around age four, they learn to lie, part of which comes from the polite social lies—like please and thank you—with which they begin indoctrination. Neureál has taken this into account and made a truth quotient scale with one being absolute truth and ten being absolute lies. They’ve set AIs at a five, meaning that David will have to decide whether or not Caprice is telling the truth—just as he would for any human in a similar situation.

  As a whole, the cast seemed more comfortable with the material, giving the sf of the piece a natural, unconscious feeling of reality. The standout performance, however, was Shaun Bennet Wilson as Neureál liason. Rachel. Perky, chipper Wilson gives Rachel an earnest, likeable quality that gradually becomes more insidious. Wilson’s professional, helpful demeanor—somewhere between a psychologist and an image consultant—was compellingly deceptive, and it took me two-thirds of the play before I suddenly realized Rachel was much closer to a cyberstalker calling all the shots. Even then, it was because Wilson allowed me to see it. In a single character, Wilson showed us our uneasy relationship with the Internet and social netwo
rking.

  The same set served this production with a few minor changes in furniture and configuration. Most notably, the screen no longer loomed over the back of the stage, and a tasteful, expensive-looking desk had been placed in the corner facing the audience in the corner downstage right. Costume designer Sidney Shannon did very little—which was perfect. The AIs looked like everybody else, disturbing and confusing the idea of whether reality is something definitive or something that we make for ourselves. What worked exceedingly well was director Eric Parness’s handling of technology.

  Nothing was overt, just as the use of technology for us in everyday life isn’t overt. The characters use it without thinking. On stage, Rachel and David “talk” via video chat by addressing one another while they look out into the audience. The staging may seem odd, but because we’re familiar with the technology, we get it. I don’t need to see an actual video chat which would detract from the notion that Rachel is on call. Seeing her sitting at the desk even while the lights and action are directed elsewhere on the stage gives me the impression that here is a woman whose job is everything to her, making her perception of Donald as a threat more plausible. David’s eyeglasses serve as a communication and Internet device. A mere casual touch by the actor, Davidow, and again, we get it. We make the leap. In turn the AIs and Rachel’s casual introduction of a Donald model at the end is appalling. We “knew” this person on stage, and he died. Yet, here he stands. To put it as performance theorist and director Richard Schechner might, he’s not David’s brother, but he’s not not David’s brother. The potential eliding of reality, of something being too real, approaches the grotesque, and it threatens us.

  Helping with this were the actors playing the AI. Their natural carriage was interrupted with subtle and not-so-subtle breaks to remind us that they weren’t in fact human. When David wasn’t there, the AIs recharged (perhaps somewhat too relaxed slumped on the furniture, but never ridiculous), and during the occasional software update, the AI would “stall” (I instantly thought of that little wheel on the computer screen). Again, the behavior is believable because, yup, our computers sit and do the same thing when updating. Caprice’s charming ignorance and earnest desire to treat people well (including Donald) was handled well by Meredith Howard and avoided falling too far to the bimbo end of the scale (unfortunately the implication is still the notion that the first practical AI application will be a sexbot). If anything, I would question the choice to clothe her in very revealing clothing, especially since part of David’s charm, according to the script, is the fact that David treats Caprice more like a friend than a sex toy.