Karel Capek’s R.U.R. hasn’t aged well. This 1920 story of robots who rebel against their creators has been done so much better in more recent fiction and the movies — just think of Blade Runner, A.I., and I, Robot for starters — that it’s hard not to find Capek’s play tame and uninventive. Maybe the problem is, we’re all Capekians now: since 1945, we’ve all been painfully aware that our technology may one day kill us, and a war with robots seems positively pleasant compared to the more urgent threats with which modern science has blessed us. In any case, this TheatreUSF production is hardly of great importance. It has a few good points in acting and design, true, and some scenes are genuinely amusing. But for the most part, it feels like an extended cliché.
The premise of the play is that the future has arrived, and R.U.R. — Rossum’s Universal Robots — is being visited by Helena Glory, daughter of an unnamed nation’s president. Her host is Harry Domin, head of the company, who explains that now human beings are free to develop their full potential unhindered by distractions like work. But Glory’s appearance isn’t so innocent: if fact, she’s a member of the League of Humanity, and has come to demand robot rights, even a robot revolution. Domin is charmed: the robots won’t fight for their desires, he says, because they have no desires; they’re the perfect slaves.
A scene later, though, the robots have decided to revolt after all, and they’re bent on exterminating every human on the planet. Somehow they’ve come to have self-consciousness and love of freedom, and the local robot group has even commandeered a battleship and trained its guns on the factory. As Domin, Glory and others desperately seek a life-saving solution, we’re supposed to absorb a terrible message (terrible for 1920, anyway): in our eagerness to use science to lighten our burdens, we may unknowingly sow the seeds of our destruction. Or, as they say at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, this thing’s not working right. Is there any escape?
Only two of the drama’s actors are on stage for any length of time, and they both turn in adequate, if not revelatory, work. Robert Maguire as Harry Domin is crisp and businesslike to a fault, never showing us any contradictions or self-doubts that might humanize him; and Molly Healy as Helena Glory is charmingly naïve, though she too often communicates a cloying damsel-in-distress passivity. Actually, the real stars of the show are two of the robots: Alex Rivera as multiple machines is earnestly engaging, and Marlene Peralta as a brand new Eve is delightful as she discovers, along with her new Adam, the precious ability to love. In briefer roles (as humans) Ryke Stearns and Ryan Bernier are innocuously helpful.
As is usual with TheatreUSF productions, the set is entirely professional. R.U.R. is produced in the round — or rather, in a square — on an attractive raised platform by Steven Mitchell, backed by enormous, handsome posters announcing how wonderful life is with robot help. There are also projection screens placed high above the audience, but these aren’t well-used: photos of the robots looking menacing are more silly than frightening, and short movie segments, in black and white, come across as amateurish and, at best, campy. Marilyn Gaspardo Bertch’s modern costumes for the humans are always felicitous, though, with the work gear of the robots especially persuasive.
Even at its best, though, R.U.R. features problems in logic that undercut its credibility. Are we really to accept that cautious Glory would fall romantically for brusque Domin only minutes after meeting him? Why would so many robots — and not just a malfunctioning few — turn against their masters? And if we’re to believe that the robots might shock their creators by actually reproducing, who gave them reproductive organs? The existence of these and other quandaries makes R.U.R. unsatisfying even beyond the objections I’ve already raised. It’s pleasing to note that Capek invented the word “robot” (actually, he claimed that his brother did), but reality and art both have overtaken him. Almost 100 years after its premiere, R.U.R. hardly registers.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2012.
