Jackalope Theatre Company’s “The Singularity Play,” with Lucy Carapetyan, Madison Hill, Christina Gorman, Ashley Neal and Kroydell Galima, at Berger Park, 2024/Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis
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Early twentieth-century Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello is famous for his multilevel metatheatrics, as in his most celebrated work, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which presents viewers with a play within a play, all wrapped inside the play they have paid to watch.
In his “The Singularity Play,” now enjoying its world premiere courtesy of Jackalope Theatre, New York playwright Jay Stull manages to out-Pirandello Pirandello, crafting an ingeniously twisty, provocative meditation on artificial intelligence that takes the form of a play within a play within a darkly mysterious play-like reality game, within the play we’re watching on stage. It’s not the easiest plot to follow, but those who successfully navigate this futuristic tale’s unpredictable zigs and zags are rewarded with a powerful cautionary tale about modern techno-hubris and the dystopic implications of a programmed, fully virtual existence.
To describe more than the surface layer of this stratified storyline would be to play spoiler. Suffice it to say that it involves a corporate-artistic collaboration between a handful of youthful theater artists and Google executives who have hired them to stage a play written by an AI program named “Denise.” The office where the team meets—designed by Ryan Emens, who makes effective use of the small, boxy Berger Park space—is conspicuously sterile and claustrophobic, and the dialogue comes off as stilted and flat, with only the Siri-like “Denise” revealing much in the way of vulnerability and personality. Otherwise, it’s mostly griping and bickering, delivered in a boringly self-righteous, mock-woke way. But the thinness of the setting and the language is intentional. We know this because, at a certain point, the situation shifts abruptly and violently, and the characters and scenarios begin to reveal their true oddness and complexity. From that point onward, the audience is rapt, trying to figure out just what kind of futuristic world they’ve been thrust into and how it relates to their own. The answers to both of these riddles are rich and intriguing—the stuff not of cheap sci-fi, but rather of high-order speculative thinking.
Jackalope Theatre Company’s “The Singularity Play,” with Madison Hill, Christina Gorman and Ashley Neal, at Berger Park, 2024/Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis
Director Georgette Verdin has elicited sharp, flavorful performances from her cast of ten, most of whom play challenging, double-sided roles. Especially worthy of note are Lucy Carapetyan as a skeptical, combative team member; Collin Quinn Rice as a manipulative theater director; Patrick Newson Jr. as a snottily superior techie and corporate soldier who declares to his human creative partners, “If there’s anyone I trust about theater, it’s Denise—she knows more about it than you do”; and Anelga Hajjar, who imparts a lovely sweetness to her role as an AI construct with an artist’s probing, rebellious soul.
It’s fine work all around, as per usual with the artistically and intellectually ambitious Jackalope troupe, which here tackles the many ethical and philosophical conundrums associated with AI. In its intermissionless ninety-five minute duration, “Singularity Play” asks so many disturbing questions about the nature of freedom, art, technology—not to mention reality. What does it mean to be a human being in a world where people are willingly melding with machines and transforming their lives into commodified data? What is it to be a writer or artist when creativity is treated as mere content, and the role of the content provider is to create ever more seductive facsimiles of reality so that giant corporations can lure us ever more deeply into online non-reality? Can a mechanized culture, which abhors the smelly, pain-inducing imperfections of the flesh, re-embrace biological existence?
Jackalope Theatre Company’s “The Singularity Play,” with Madison Hill, Christina Gorman and Lucy Carapetyan, at Berger Park, 2024/Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis
Playwright Stull brings to light the crackpot motivations of the emerging post-human ideology, noting that our era is defined by a wish to completely collapse the distance between desire and fulfillment—which, in a capitalist context, means reducing life to pure consumerism. This is the “singularity” of the play’s title, the point where existence becomes an engineered spectacle experienced by emotionally stunted cyborgs. “Singularity Play” is set in an unspecified future, which by the end begins to seem more near than far.
The production has its issues. The play’s multiple nested realities are communicated through shifts in backdrop, lighting and especially costumes (kudos to Izumi Inaba)—but not in the performances themselves. More needs to be done in terms of voice, movement and rhythm to distinguish the relatively familiar situation at the beginning from the far weirder developments of the second act. There should be less continuity and more disjunction. The fault is in both the script, which fails to elevate or alter the diction, and in the staging, which could use more variety and a heavier dose of the uncanny. These are fixable problems for an important play, which I sincerely hope makes the leap from the tiny Berger Park space to larger audiences and national exposure.
Jackalope Theatre Company’s “The Singularity Play,” with Anelga Hajjar, at Berger Park, 2024/Photo: Matthew Gregory Hollis
“The Singularity Play” is a timely and compelling show, if not a particularly hopeful one. It’s a paradoxical and unpreachy yet hard-hitting tale, whose most sympathetic and human character is a coded algorithm. But it’s not afraid to point out the morbid and even demonic aspects of unchecked technological “progress.” It’s also a play that confirms Jackalope’s reputation as a skilled and discerning company that picks its projects with care and executes them with passion and flair. See this show if you have any doubts about AI. Even more so, see it if you don’t.
Jackalope Theatre Company presents “The Singularity Play” through June 22 at Berger Park, 6205 North Sheridan. Thursday-Saturday and select Mondays, 7:30pm; Sundays at 3pm. Tickets are $15-$35; available at (773)340-2543 or jackalopetheatre.org.
