I would guess that most audience members who go to see City Lit’s “freely adapted” version of “R.U.R.” are not intimately familiar with the original 1920 play, written by Czech playwright Karel Capek. These people may have difficulty understanding why I—as someone who does know and admire Capek’s dystopian drama about a robot uprising—would find this production, directed by City Lit executive artistic director Brian Pastor, so disappointing.
There are two major reasons why I can’t recommend this show. The first is the issue of mislabeling. It’s true that in the program, above the large and futuristic “R.U.R.” title, are printed the small and inconspicuous words, “Bo List’s,” Mr. List being the adapter of Capek’s Faustian tale of techno-hubris. But—in terms of characters, language, mood, literary level and, to a lesser extent, plot and theme—this is not “R.U.R.” and it should not bear that title. Calling it “R.U.R. 2.0” would be less misleading, although even that name suggests more similarity to the original than we get.
Had List merely updated the play, trimming away some of the Edwardian sexism and tossing in a reference or two to artificial intelligence, our own generation’s Frankenstein monster of a technology, it would be forgivable—not that the richly philosophical and dramatically potent original needs much spiffing up. But this is not an update of a classic. It’s more of a travesty, a goofy, gag-riddled comedy sketch that, at least for the first two-thirds of the two-hour-plus-long show, tries to keep us in stitches as we contemplate the prospect of humanity committing species suicide in the name of industrial efficiency. Why the adapter would wish to turn cosmic tragedy, with just a smidgen of hope at the end, into knockabout farce is a mystery to me.
The rough outline of the Capek plot remains, although the story is both simplified and sped up, giving the play the breathless pacing of a Saturday-morning cartoon. R.U.R. stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots, a massively profitable mega-corporation ensconced on its own island. The company possesses the secret for manufacturing (supposedly) obedient thinking machines that, at the unspecified moment when the play takes place, do essentially all work. These robots (a word introduced into English by this play), built to realize the false paradise of a world without work, were developed by old man Rossum, described by a veteran employee as a “raving lunatic.” Dead now, old Rossum has been succeeded in List’s adaptation by his son Harry, who alone knows how to semi-humanize the robots by adding the secret ingredient known as “AI”–which here stands for Automated Ingenuity.
As the play opens, this Prospero’s island ruled by scientific wizardry is visited by Helena Glory, the young and naive daughter of the president of the unnamed country where the company is based, who wishes to inspect the factory and advocate for more humane treatment of the brutally exploited and allegedly soulless robots. As romance blossoms between Harry and Helena, something else is brewing too: the self-learning AI-treated robots are questioning why they should play second fiddle to the imperfect, inefficient human beings who make and program them.
The play’s premise is a sound one, but it’s sabotaged by director Pastor’s stagnant, monotone staging, the relentless silliness of the pasted-on comedy and the reduction of the play’s characters to flattened caricature. Bryan Breau’s Harry, supposedly the head of a vast industrial concern, is a dimwitted nepo baby who holds his breath when he’s frustrated and gets tongue-tied around attractive women, uttering Freudian malapropisms like “colorectal” for “corrective,” while Madelyn Loehr’s Helena is a ditsy ingenue whose personality and motivations never quite coalesce. Shawna Tucker is over-the-top as Helena’s aging attendant Nana, who morphs abruptly and absurdly from grandma to gun moll when the robots go on the attack, and Mary Ross as Dr. Gall mashes together several roles from the original play into one generic, bug-eyed mad scientist.
The robots, by and large, come off better, especially Claudia Sevilla’s synthetically cheerful Tibia (a newly added character), who comes across as a walking, beaming Siri on steroids. Sean William Kelly scores as the ambivalent, semi-sympathetic Radius, who comes to know fear as he realizes that his limited robot lifespan is nearing its end, and Alex George gives an icy coldness to Sulla, the leader of the robot revolt. But Sulla’s erotically charged encounter with Helena in the first act seems purely titillating and, like many moments here, disconnected from the larger narrative.
The one “human” performance that stands out is that of Brian Parry. He plays the veteran employee Alquist who, like Nana, has a deep-down skepticism of the robots and the way they negate the dignity of work, which defines him. Parry’s long soliloquy toward the end is the high point of the play; it’s the point where the show ceases to be loud and cute, instead becoming quiet and truthful.
Mostly, though, the show skirts the more serious thoughts and mature emotions of the Capek script, adopting a young-adult style that’s all about easy laughs, one-note characters, jokey anachronisms (“LOL” comes up repeatedly) and an avoidance of anything resembling an intellectual debate or a complex idea. It’s a real loss. Capek’s “R.U.R.” remains in the repertoire because it’s about more than scary robots. It’s also about scary capitalism and how greed-driven science, directed by arrogant and unaccountable corporate oligarchs, cannot but turn against humanity. That lesson, so relevant today, is only touched on in this lite version of Capek’s play.
In the “R.U.R.” press release, City Lit Theater describes itself as committed to “certain civilizing influences—tradition imaginatively explored, a life of the mind, trust in an audience’s intelligence—that not every cultural outlet shares.” That’s an ambitious mission, one that depends upon knowing the difference between updating a classic and dumbing it down. City Lit is an important part of the city’s theater scene, and I hope they learn from this particular play selection, which, in light of their mission statement, just does not compute.
“R.U.R.” runs through June 15 at City Lit Theater, 1020 West Bryn Mawr, at the Edgewater Presbyterian Church. Tickets are $35, with senior, student and military discounts available. Tickets are available online at citylit.org or by phone at (773)293-3682.
