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Over 100 years ago, Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the word “robot” in his pioneering play, “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” The show, which premiered in 1921, also anticipated some of the thorny issues now arising around artificial intelligence. Though robots themselves turned out to be different than what Čapek imagined, the play’s themes seem timelier than ever.
Foothill Theatre Arts is presenting the West Coast premiere of a new adaptation of “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” sometimes also called “R.U.R.” The show opens Nov. 7 at Foothill College.
Director Bruce McLeod first read the original version of the play in college, and struck by its forward-looking subject matter and themes, has long wanted to stage it. The show is comic, rather than horror-driven, and raises lots of questions about the relationship between technology and humanity. But for all the prescient vision of Čapek’s script, its century-old humor seemed pretty creaky for modern audiences. It was also long, clocking in at nearly three hours.
“It’s been on my list for a long time. It’s topical now, talking about AI. But it’s just such a hard script to make work. And it wasn’t that funny — it wasn’t obviously funny. The play was written and translated in the ’20s. So it was not that the language is horrible, it’s just that the structure and the attitudes are so different,” McLeod said.
As McLeod was looking for plays to stage this fall, a friend shared a review for a production of “Rossum’s Universal Robots” in Chicago this summer that premiered a new adaptation by playwright Bo List. While keeping the 1920s setting, List’s adaptation shortens the play to around two hours, and modernizes the language and humor, including incorporating references to AI.
The titular beings of “Rossum’s Universal Robots” look just like humans – a significant element in the story of both upheaval and romance that springs up at a robotics factory in an unnamed country. The robots created here fill the menial jobs that humans don’t wish to do. (Čapek took the term “robot” from a Czech word meaning “servitude,” according to Foothill Theatre Arts’ press materials.)
This dynamic spurred McLeod to draw inspiration from what might seem to be unexpected sources: “Downton Abbey” and similar dramas about class differences.
“In any kind of public and often private space, but certainly in public spaces, the upper-class characters act as if the servants are not there, even though later on, you find out these servants were listening and they’re talking about them behind their back and all that,” McLeod said. “But they’re standing quietly in the background, and they just forget they’re there, and they say stuff that comes back some other way.”
In the play, Helena Glory, head of the Humanity League and daughter of the nation’s president, visits the robot factory run by Harry Rossum, son of the robots’ inventor. Helena’s initial goal is to ensure the robots are treated well, but soon she and Harry fall for each other. After being away from the factory briefly, they return to a robot uprising, with the androids now running everything.
“She cares very deeply about humanitarian practices and if the robots are being treated equally, and she’s very curious about the whole process. I’d say at the beginning she is there really to give Rossum a piece of her mind,” said Trinity White, who plays Helena in Foothill’s production. “She’s there to get stuff done, essentially, and then she kind of ends up getting caught up a little bit with all the other characters and Rossum and the whole robot uprising. She has quite a character arc throughout the show.”
Since humans and robots in this world appear the same, actors must rely on movements and mannerisms to differentiate them. McLeod enlisted a Foothill colleague, Kay Thornton, who teaches a movement for theater class, to help cast members get in touch with their android sides.
“She came in and did a workshop with the cast and (shared) what the theories were that she was working from in terms of bodily movement. The reality is that most robotics people know that the hard thing for humanoid robots is getting the joints and body to move in three dimensions, rather than just two,” McLeod said.
“So if you’re looking at a robot arm, there’s a reason that it just bends up and down at the elbow. Whereas if you just take your arm and hold it out, you can twist your arm and raise it at the same time. You can break it down mathematically and into multiple components, but it’s a really hard thing to do and to control (in robots). So the robots are more rigid, less flexible, and there are certain tells.”
McLeod said that he and the cast also developed a subtle way to show how the robots communicate with each other.
“We’ve had to settle on a gesture for the robots who were sending information, and for the robots who were receiving it. It wasn’t anything in the play that says that. It was just when we thought about the behavior and what’s going on in the play (we wondered) ‘How do they communicate with each other?’ Then we (decided), ‘Okay, well, it’s wireless.’ So we have a gesture that’s sort of like a salute, but not quite,” McLeod said.
Without giving too much away, the character of Helena ends up with a robot double, called Helena 2.0. White had a chance to play both robot and human, though Helena’s personality provides common ground between the two.
“The interesting thing is that Helena as a robot is still slightly more human, and there’s still a set difference between her and the other robots that ended up being recreated. So she’s seen as a failure and something that needs to be disassembled and fixed, because she still possesses a lot of human qualities,” White said, noting that there are a lot of similarities between how Helena and Helena 2.0 speaks and acts.
“In a way, that made it a little bit easier for me to switch between the two,” she said.
The shared humanity among Helena and Helena 2.0 and their emphasis on treating other beings humanely highlights a theme that seems to go beyond tech.
“I think it’s this idea that we all still feel, and those feelings are still important, regardless of who you are, your background, or anything like that. That’s what I hope people take away. We’re all different, but at the same time, we’re all the same, and it’s important that we treat others with kindness and respect, and that’s truly important to keep everything in unison and together,” White said.
“I hope people engage in the conversation about AI and I think they will. I mean, they already are, but this play, because of the way Bo List has streamlined the plot and the dialogue about automation and AI, it really is very clear about choices,” McLeod said. “So it’s all in there, but it’s all distilled down to what I think is a more accessible look at the conversation.”
Rossum’s Universal Robots runs Nov. 7-23 at the Lohman Theatre, Foothill College, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills. General admission tickets are $28 ($18 for Thursdays)/seniors $25 ($18 Thursdays)/ youth/students $23 ($15 Thursdays). app.arts-people.com.
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