THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
San Francisco based Lauren Gunderson is America’s most performed living dramatist, yet we’ve seen relatively little of her on this side of the pond. That’s going to change because after Anthropology there will be the high-profile West End musical The Time Traveller’s Wife for which she’s done the book and The Book of Will, about Shakespeare, which is finishing a UK tour at Shakespeare North. She’s certainly one to watch.
This one is a very timely and welcome fusing of a domestic drama with an exploration of the role and ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Merril (MyAnna Burning) is a leading tech engineer working on Natural Language Processing. She’s in the depths of grief because a year earlier her sister Angie disappeared while walking home from college. The police have long abandoned their search and to balm her pain she has decided to build a digital simulation of her sister built up from all Angie’s digital footprint in the world. We all have lots of it, believe me! The resulting ‘virtual Angie’ is impressive and provides some initial solace.
The play asks what more is there to us than our full digital footprint. AI can easily aggregate all our expressed thoughts, actions, desires and biases, and if it can fuse all that and accurately simulate our voices then what is left? At one level this is quite a nihilistic view and one which finds no place for the comforts/delusions (delete as appropriate) of faith. In this story it stems from a society with an astonishing inability to properly come to terms with death.
Dakota Blue Richards does a great job as ‘virtual Angie’ who we see on screen but mostly hear as a disembodied voice on the laptop. She’s funny and crude and girlish and teasing but with sprinklings of roboticism in her speech. In those moments we can almost hear the algorithm, which undergirds her personality, ticking away. As Merril says “the effect is effective”.
The obvious challenge here of course is that AI systems don’t have consciousness. They learn but only by repeating back knowledge that already exists, they cannot empathize or replicate the human experience of the social and physical world. They don’t possess the level of emotional intelligence or ‘common sense’ of humans and they haven’t learned to fake this well enough ...yet.
The AI technology presented here is wonderfully spooky however and it will really make you shudder. To lighten matters Gunderson deftly interweaves a compelling family story here. Merril is the sensible one, who had to be parent to her sister, 10 years younger, when their mother Brin (Abigail Thaw) was absent or drugged out or chasing wayward husbands. Thaw is touching as the sole representative of the oldies here. While a mess, she is still smart enough to ground the madness. Matters are complicated too when Merril is drawn to Angie’s (ex) girlfriend Raquel. Yolanda Kettle is impressive here, but you do wonder how she doesn’t flee.
Merril asks Brin for her phone and inputs the data to ‘AI Angie’ with the result that it produces “inconsistencies in the patterns” as it puts it. Brin’s emails and texts lead the machine to the perpetrator of Angie’s disappearance and so they are able to rescue the now traumatized young woman. But the nagging question remains did the machine withhold information it already had, as its primary role was just to “support Merril”. In other words, did AI Angie have motivation or worse, malicious intent. Questions beget other questions, especially when real and the AI Angie finally meet up.
Georgia Lowe’s minimalist set is a smart, gray, empty box framed with neon until a final section when Daniel Denton’s video design comes into its own. It’s all good at keeping the focus firmly on the voices and Anna Ledwich’s direction is taut and uncluttered, thereby allowing this sharp ensemble to hold the audience rapt.
This is a great, knotty, problem play that is both accessible and intriguing.
