The Free Press
In the future, sooner than you think, we’re all going to have computer chips implanted in our brains. Or maybe we’ll all have full-service robot assistants, who will be able to make us a cocktail just how we like it and suggest the perfect jazz playlist to enjoy it with. It’s possible that we’re on the precipice of an AI-powered technological revolution that will, in pursuit of our mass enlightenment, end in our own mass extinction. Or maybe we’re just going to have more realistic porn.
These and many other scenarios are laid out in three new plays about artificial general intelligence, currently being staged on and off Broadway: The Antiquities, Maybe Happy Ending, and Doomers. They were not, as far as we know, written by AI, though Doomers credits the AI assistants ChatGPT and Claude as part of the “production team” in the program. These plays don’t necessarily tell us what the AGI apocalypse is going to look like. Nobody can tell us that. But they do tell us how humans act when presented with a new and unwieldy technology. It’s a welcome trend in the theater-verse, where offerings often fall into the dusty or pandering buckets; does the world really need BOOP!, a musical about Betty Boop? Or another rendition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, except this time, with a girl! Or the bicentennial run of The Lion King?
True, theater is an odd medium in which to explore such an abstract subject. It’s hard enough to wrap your mind around concepts like interpretability and superintelligence, let alone get actors to communicate them to the public, while being entertaining. And these plays are sometimes a little awkward in trying to do all that. But unlike so much theater, they’re humanizing a subject that’s both in the headlines—see this month: DeepSeek, Elon bidding to buy OpenAI, and Project Stargate—and very much on our minds.
Written by Jordan Harrison and co-directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, The Antiquities imagines a museum dedicated to the “Late Human Age.” The ten exhibits, presented as vignettes that take place from 1816 to 2240, tell the story of how artificial intelligence, slowly, and then all at once, stamped out humanity. The audience is on a tour of a place built for the artificially intelligent beings who’ll replace us, and just like humans, when AIs reconstruct the past, they get some things wrong. A clunky desktop, a teddy bear, and an old cropped T-shirt are all presented in an exhibit as “prosthetics to make the wearer more immortal.” The Antiquities makes the point that even before Neuralink, our species, whether because of laziness or hubris, tended toward transhumanism, often without accounting for the costs.
Maybe Happy Ending offers another view of a future where AI is fully unleashed, except this time, the robots are the ones who get screwed. The musical—which boasts the most jaw-dropping staging but not one memorable song—originated in South Korea but is now being shown in English and on Broadway. It stars a game and physically brilliant Darren Criss as Oliver and Helen J Shen as Claire. Both are retired “HelperBots” who live in a kind of old age home for tech condemned by their human owners to obsolescence, yet cursed by their makers with sentience. The show is about how, as robots become indistinguishable from humans, and learn to anticipate our desires, it’s we flesh and blood beings who start acting more callous and machinelike.
Oliver waits hopefully and helplessly, year in and year out, for his owner to pick him up, until he decides to track his owner down himself, acting out a wrenching late–twenty-first-century version of Toy Story. Eventually, Oliver and Claire fall in love. Or at least their software does.
And then there’s Doomers, which tackles AI from the present-ish. It’s a roman à clef in two acts about the high-drama weekend in November 2023 when OpenAI tried and failed to oust its founder Sam Altman. In the first act, the Sam character, “Seth”—played deftly, if with artistic license, by Sam Hyrkin—gathers allies to strategize about getting the company, called MindMesh, back under his control. “This is my war room, okay? You’re not allowed to think I have a power fetish,” he barks. “Or if you do, you’re not allowed to think it’s bad.” It’s a send-up of San Francisco Bay culture—“My Waymo actually ran over a stray dog on the way over here”—shot through with existential angst; so is this thing going to kill us, or not?
In its best moments, Doomers feels like a live-action version of The Social Network—the David Fincher–directed drama that recounted the fraught founding of Facebook. Both try to capture the pitfalls and promise and power lust of being a human, and a prickly one at that, making the kind of technology that could remake the world.
Plenty of movies from War Games to Gattaca have tried to do the same, as have shows like Black Mirror and Severance. It makes sense to watch sci-fi on a screen since they’re ostensibly the portal to the future that sci-fi depicts, but what’s great about watching it onstage is that the story isn’t mediated by high technology beyond clever lighting and sound design, if even that. It becomes much easier to see how AI is going to interfere with actual real-world bodies and voices and relationships; they are live, there can be no CGI or clever cinematography. It forces the audience to wonder how the AI revolution, when it comes, might actually look. What it might sound like.
Blessedly, actual screens are mostly missing from the stages. (Matthew Gasda, the playwright and director of Doomers, calls his play “low tech.”) An exception is one scene in The Antiquities, set in 1994, which sees a young mother standing over the shoulder of her son as he sits at his hulking, taupe computer dialing up to the internet for the first time. She wonders aloud, “Did you ever think you’d live in the future?” Later, when prompted by her husband to ask the internet a question, she bellows into the monitor, “Will I ever make it to Paris?” It’s a relatable scene. It takes a while to understand how a given advancement will actually affect or improve your life. Until then, it feels like anything might be possible.
Other moments work less well, as in a scene from 1910 when factory workers reflect on the machinery they labor over, “We were told ‘It will be easier, it will serve you.’ Now I serve it.” We get it!
In plays about artificial intelligence, expect many metaphors. AI is like fire; it will transform our species. AI is a hammer—a tool or a weapon depending on who is wielding it. Or maybe it’s more like electricity; undergirding everything. AI is like the internet, but times a gajillion. It’s penicillin. It’s the iceberg in the Titanic, or maybe it’s the Titanic itself. AI is a meteor, as The Antiquities suggests, hurtling toward earth. We’re the dinosaurs. AI is like an overgrown garden.
With so many metaphors, it’s hard to keep track of what it is we’re talking about exactly. And who, if anyone, really understands how this thing works. None of the AI plays are at risk of being overly technical, or too abstract. The Antiquities even manages to wedge in more than one instance of oral sex; impressive, given the subject matter. Instead of explaining the intricacies of large language models or alignment, all three plays just assume that the viewer agrees: The robots are coming.
But they also raise the question, especially for an AI skeptic, “So where’s my flying car?” Will I make it to Paris?
For all the future casting—the talk of billions of dollars, existential risk, and mega-compute—it’s a relief when the lights come up and you’re reminded: The humans are still in charge, still deciding whether we’re building heaven or hell, even as we build it.
The salient parts in these plays are the most human ones, which tackle the same themes that freight the shows that were written before there were even typewriters. Gasda describes his show as a “political drama about who gets to sit on the throne,” adding that artificial general intelligence “is like the ghost in Hamlet or the sphinx in Oedipus. It incites the characters to act out their interests.” In these plays, there is loneliness, doubt, power, memory and, yes, connection.
There was barely a dry eye in the house when the curtain came down on Maybe Happy Ending—though I won’t give away the ending any more than the title does. Still, the person I sat next to remained unmoved. “So everyone’s crying because two vacuum cleaners fell in love?”
