Tonight █████ and I go to see Heddatron at HERE. It's more or less "Hedda Gabler" with robots. Real robots. Live on stage.
Well, not live robots, of course, but live robots, you see:
Les Freres Corbusier continues its irreverent massacre of historical icons and academic esoterica by taking on famed playwright Henrik Ibsen, the well-made play, and contemporary issues in robotics. Ibsen is thwarted by August Strindberg and his kitchen slut throughout his fevered struggle to write the great feminist drama, Hedda Gabler, while a contemporary housewife in Michigan is abducted by robots and forced to perform Ibsen's masterpiece over and over again...
With real functioning robots portraying half of the parts, alongside humans who will play the other half, Heddatron will be one of the first theatrical productions to use functional robots as actors. Employing robotic automation and text-to-speech software, humans will perform opposite a hunky Lovborg-bot, a clunky Tessman-bot, as well as blinking, smoking, and whirring co-stars who portray Judge Brack, Aunt Julie, and the rest of Ibsen's menagerie.
You might have caught the New York Times story about the show last week. The robots of Heddatron have been created specifically for this production by Botmatrix, which sounds like a whole collective of Susan Calvins.
The play's director, Alex Timbers, says: "These girls [from Botmatrix] think robots get a bad rap in pop culture. And that caused me to reassess how we were depicting them. There was an earlier draft in which Ibsen constructed robots to help him kill young women, and during a reading I felt a little embarrassed and ashamed to look over at [the roboticists] and see their reactions. The robots have taken on a much more positive force in the show."
Too bad Asimov didn't live to see this. I can't wait.
Watch for my review of Heddatron next week in Science Fiction Weekly.
