Brenda Barrie, “Sisters”/Photo: Hugo Hentoff

Theater is an ephemeral art. Nothing seems to capture that notion quite like technology. A few years ago, when it premiered, Matthew Libby’s “Sisters” may have been more revolutionary. The play offers a glimpse at how an AI entity could be used as a sister figure for decades upon decades. But in 2026, the play feels obsolete.

Matilda (Brenda Barrie) is six years old when her mother dies. Her father then creates an AI companion named Greta (an off-stage Chloe Johnston) to keep her company, an artificial sister who will stay with Matilda for the next ninety years. As the years go by or jump back in time again in Libby’s non-linear story, we hear how Greta is advancing through the years. Her once mechanical, stilted voice becomes startlingly lifelike. Gasps, dramatic pauses and sarcasm in the later versions of Greta demonstrate how she has learned to vocalize like a human being.

Don’t get me wrong, Barrie and Johnston are remarkable in their roles. Barrie oscillates between ages forward or backward in time with ease. Her six-year-old Matilda is met with the same gravitas as angsty teenage Tilda or her elderly iteration. At the same time, Johnston’s voice throughout the show is well attuned to how her character is growing, although we never see her. We can feel her presence adjust time and time again, reminding us of the dramatic speed of technological advancement.

But that is where the script’s coding falls short. The premise rings as frustratingly artificial as its second protagonist. Technological limitations aside, like the confusing notion that an AI entity only exists in a singular computer, the show does little to push any conversation of this technology forward while the final third of the show trudges along like dial-up. Despite being only ninety minutes, it was a long ninety minutes.

Brenda Barrie, “Sisters”/Photo: Hugo Hentoff

As a huge fan of the 2018 video game “Detroit: Become Human,” Libby’s “Sisters” premise intrigues me so much. That game is all about how we perceive sentience and what kind of rights artificial lifeforms should or can have. Yet “Sisters” fails to really dig into what it means for AI or any alternative lifeform to gain any semblance of humanity. Greta’s insistence on existence, like the notion that she also lost her father when Matilda’s biological dad inevitably dies, reads more as manipulation than actual human-like pain.

Like Janet, the android-like character from “The Good Place,” who begs for her life (while insisting she cannot die) on the beach when the characters threaten to flip her kill switch, it’s hard to gauge whether we are supposed to empathize with Greta or hate her. Maybe that’s the point Libby was trying to make with “Sisters”: that even after decades of existing with technological beings, we are left without a concrete sense of who they are in the grand scheme of our lives? Even after days of thinking about this play I am still not sure what the point is—an indication that the script has bugs.

All this play really does, though, is demonstrate that some topics seem to give scripts short lifespans. In 2026, as AI data centers are threatening our freshwater sources faster than we ever could have imagined, this doesn’t feel like the story we should be telling. A play that doesn’t stand on one side or another of such a deeply problematic technological field isn’t helpful. I’ve never known sibling relationships to feel so contrived, and AI relationships shouldn’t be either.

“Sisters” is on stage at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, through November 8.