WE ARE YOUR ROBOTS
Book and Lyrics by Ethan Lipton
Music Composed and Performed by
Ethan Lipton, Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy and Ian Riggs
Directed by Leigh Silverman
A Production of Theatre for a New Audience and Rattlestick Theatre
Polonsky Shakespeare Center
Reviewed by David Spencer
We Are Your Robots has been branded a musical, but that’s misleading. It’s a concept concert, and in its wry attitude, perhaps even more of a concept club date. Pop-rock-jazz songwriter Ethan Lipton and his bandmates present themselves as sophisticated, thinking-feeling robots. Lipton as commentator takes us through an odyssey of questions and answers (alternately spoken and sung commentary) about the relationship between robots and humans; how robots will never hurt humans or encroach upon human livelihoods (a tacit nod, perhaps, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics); what humans may want from robots and what robots can offer; and underlying that, what humans (who are after all, the inventors of robots) want for themselves.
The themes are existential, the text is ruminative, and the tone…well, try to imagine George Carlin, without anger, profanity or axes to grind, crossed with Randy Newman, equally defanged but not quite toothless.
Under the appropriately modest direction of Leigh Silverman, there are modest special effects, but mostly there’s an air of concentration on abstract ideas. Intellectual movement within near-stillness. Nothing pushed, no fear that you aren’t getting what’s being got at. Since there’s nothing much in the way of drama, that’s harder to maintain than it sounds. But Lipton has the knack of delivering deadpan comedy and getting good, solid laughs out of it. And the songs, in the pop-jazz-rock-commentary niche are attractive stuff. Minimalist and they don’t have wide harmonic range, but then, this is presumably the musical language of robots.
How much you dig the evening may depend on how charmed you are by it, and how willing to go Zen with its 80 intermissionless minutes. I personally never got restless or impatient, but at the 2/3 mark I felt I had pretty much gotten the message, and my companion of the evening felt the same. But in this regard, We Are Your Robots is very much an eye-and-ear of the beholder experience. What’s most important is knowing what you’re in for; so that beyond buying to Lipton and Company as robots, there are no illusions…