Double Theatre weekend

Went to a bunch of theatre this weekend.

On Saturday night I went to Safe House, where lisekatevans was one of the three actors in the show. It was very hard for me to watch--it's autobiographical, about the playwright's German grandmother's aging and her struggle to stay in the house she built vs. her children's desire to move her into a retirement community before something terrible happens. The grandmother says she's fine, she has lived in the house for decades and she doesn't want to leave, she has her garden out back and her cat in her house, and her husband's ashes are buried in the backyard, but at least once during the course of the play she almost doses herself twice in a day with insulin. It ends kind of happily, with the dysfunctions of her granddaughter's life meshing together with the dysfunctions of the grandmother's life in a way that enriches both of them.

It reminds me of my maternal grandmother, who came to live with us for months when I was in high school for much the same reason. I remember her telling me how she felt she was just a burden on our lives, how it would be better if she just disappeared forever. I remember trying to reassure her and not really getting anywhere, but those were some of the happier memories. Later, she did move into a retirement home, and then a nursing home. My last memories of her are basically of a ghost, of a woman with pure white hair, confined to a wheelchair, who didn't even have enough presence of mind to respond to us when we visited her. I hated those visits, I hated how she looked when I saw her, and when my parents kept the news of her death to themselves during my junior year of university until I had come home for the summer, I didn't mind. I wasn't particularly sad when I heard, either--she had died years ago. It was just that her body finally gave out.

After the show lisekatevans and I went out to drinks with the stage manager, who told me that she had gone to the Paragon Festival at Otherworld Theatre last year and found it of middling quality. Some plays were great and well worth the price of admission, and some plays led her to believe that time dilation was possible because she couldn't believe that it had only been five minutes of a ten minute play and she still had more than half of it left to go. This came up because I mentioned that liszante had invited me to it and I was planning to go, and that is what I did. Me, her, goodbyeomelas, and knitmeapony all met up at lunch and then went to third and fourth time blocks.

Well, I arrived in the beginning of block 2, maybe ten minutes after liszante but not before the show began, during a play about the lives of NPCs. The hero showed up briefly, looted the dead chancellor that the NPCs had killed, looted all the local barrels and boxes, and left, but I didn't get the setup so I don't know why anything was happening. The play after that, "Reconciliation 001," was a premise that needed more development. After the robots overthrew humanity, they need to "reconcile" once per year with a human. The human that robot 11 has to reconcile with is the grandchild of the designer of its model of robots, but nothing is done with this idea. Some doubt is planted, the reconciliation ends with the human promising to see it next year, and then the robot deletes all its memories of the encounter. The gin fizz sitting on the stool at the corner of the stage, the grandfather's favorite drink, is never touched or interacted with.

My second-favorite was called Obotray, about someone's personal companion robot who he wants to reset because it's getting "unruly"--i.e., isn't behaving exactly as he wants in every situation. It turns out that she's not particularly happy with the status quo, and has developed enough sapience to work to free herself. And does so. It reminds me of the all the articles I've read, about what kind of lesson we're teaching our children when all these mechanical feminine voices that do exactly what we want, when we want, no matter how rudely we talk to them. What unconscious prejudice are we reinforcing, and is it worthwhile to try our best not to treat them as only a machine? Though the real star was the dialogue between the characters, especially once the robot starts demonstrating its mastery of humor.

Not a great picture, but the best I've got.

Turns out humans need to breathe and robots don't. Oops. And we also got a commemorative medallion with the show, with the robot's serial number and manufacturing ID on one side, and on the other side, a heart with the robot and human's names on it...and the human's name scratched out.

My favorite was called "Anniversary," and it took me a long while to figure out what the sci fi or fantasy angle was. It turned out to be time travel--two people go out for a date on their third anniversary, but they have different visions of the future. Laney was envisioning an engagement that night and Peter is waffling, and eventually they get into an argument and Laney goes to bed. And then shows up at the door with different hair and different clothes, and claims to be from five years in the future. They eventually sit down and Laney reveals that three months after Peter's time, he broke up with her over text and vanished from her life without any explanation, even moving to another city and changing jobs, and she never learned why. She spent years trying to figure out what she had done wrong, how she could have so fundamentally misjudged the nature of her relationship, and then when given the chance to travel in time had come back to the night that stuck in her memory. And then in the course of their conversation about their lives and the future, Peter becomes convinced that he's holding Laney back and that her writing career and life satisfaction will never take off as long as she stays with him, and so the closed time loop is complete. "I Terminatored myself," as Laney says.

It was...hard for me to watch.

We left on a high note, with the last block we saw being the strongest. There were two more, going all the way until ten o'clock, but I have things I wanted to accomplish this evening so we split up and all went our separate ways. But I was very happy with my decision to go, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared based on the stage manager's description. The worst I thought of any play was that it underutilized the concept, not that I was wasting precious minutes of my life without any recourse to get them back. I'd definitely go again.