Huh. Hedda Gabler is my favorite Ibsen play, and pro'lly ranks up in my top five favorite plays. Dunno about this, though:
It has become passé for fringe theater to reinterpret classic works in new, often bizarre ways - The Importance of Being Earnest performed by dominatrices, Death of a Salesman in a disco. But on February 8 in New York City, the underground theatrical superstars Les Freres Corbusier premiere the first production of Hedda Gabler in which half of the major roles are played by robots. Not humans in funny suits, but walking, talking machines performing live onstage. It's titled, naturally, Heddatron.
Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the show's producer, has an unassuming air - you wouldn't expect him to be responsible for this kind of craziness. And over lunch recently in Union Square, he makes a convincing case that his approach to the play is anything but mad. "Hedda Gabler, of all Ibsen's plays, is about transcendence, the desire to escape this world and the characters' inability to escape the roles society shapes for them," he says, looking down at his vegetarian chili, then back up as though it had spoken to him. "It made perfect sense: robots."
Hedda Gabler, which many consider Henrik Ibsen's masterpiece, tells the story of a deeply conflicted woman whose world comes crashing down when she's faced with the success of a former lover. The resulting tensions between loyalty, social position, and her own heart drive the action. Heddatron is considerably less linear. It bounces from robots enacting a doomed staging of Hedda Gabler, to student book reports on Ibsen's plays, to a mother in Ypsilanti, Michigan, whom the robots abduct to star in their production, to Ibsen's house, where the playwright lives with his overbearing wife and what the script terms a kitchen slut. The 19th-century Swedish playwright August Strindberg also appears, carrying a sack of used condoms and writing plays with a Sharpie that's glued to his crotch.
OK, that's just silly.
It might be difficult for machine actors to convey the full dimensions of the human condition. But Elizabeth Meriwether's strange script cuts to the heart of Ibsen's story: A woman chained up in her own life struggles to break free of social programming. That struggle is mirrored by the robots, who attempt to escape their own programming and achieve true AI - self-awareness.
Um....