The play talks about the next development in AI technology for beings like Stacy, an “approximation of soul” app (AOS). Yet she retains bodily memories, which she recounts in a vivid monologue about a past gig as a sex worker. After Aislin dies, Stacy’s brain will be wiped by the tech company (“Singularity”) that made her, and she will have no memories of Aislin or of who she was with Aislin. Her AI brain is specialized solely for her work with Aislin. In the second act, Stacy is hacked, and Koviak delivers flawlessly a rapid-fire, disconnected, manic sense of what an AI entity’s nervous breakdown might sound, look, and feel like.īut is Stacy more than a sophisticated “toaster,” as Aislin initially calls her? Can she understand beauty and its transience? Can she feel empathy and act on it? Can she understand her past and look to a future? Stacy’s evolution as a being leads to positive answers to the first two questions. ![]() Twice, she inhabits the character of Roberto, Aislin’s thoroughly unpleasant son, to whom Koviak lends the physicality and voice of a simultaneously obnoxious and wounded New Yorker. ![]() Rivera, who also directed the production, gives Stacy some striking individual moments. Take Stacy, whom Aislin describes as simultaneously “beautiful and creepy.” Koviak, with her strong dance background, takes her character on a marvelous physical acting journey, her movement beginning stiffly robotic and gradually becoming freer and more humanly “natural,” eventually teaching Aislin how to dance. Sara Koviak (behind) as Stacy and Anne O’Sullivan as Aislin in the world premiere of ‘Your Name Means Dream’ by José Rivera at CATF in 2023. In this genre, the key questions are whether machines can become human, thinking and feeling beings, and to the extent they can, what are the implications for both the robots and the humans who interact with them? Given current rapid advances in AI, these questions are becoming more than hypothetical. Data, and, in a closer parallel to Rivera’s play, the 2012 movie Robot & Frank, about a man slipping into dementia who is cared for by a relatable (if not physically humanoid) robot. Familiar examples include Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, the replicants in Blade Runner, Star Trek’s Mr. ![]() The play delves into the contemporary promise of and concerns about AI, but it is at heart the story of a relationship between the elderly Aislin (Anne O’Sullivan) and Stacy (Sara Koviak), her human-like AI robot caregiver.Įxploring the potential “humanity” - in both its good and bad senses - of robots has long been a theme in stories and films going back at least to Karl Čapek’s 1928 R.U.R. Breathtaking acting anchors a brilliant world premiere of José Rivera’s Your Name Means Dream at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
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