Subject: Review: RUR by Karel Capek

From: Grumpy Stevens <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Oct 1999 10:59:35 -0400

R. U. R.,  Karel Capek
	Review by Stevens R. Miller
This review is in the public domain.  All rights abandoned.

Directed by John Spitzer
Produced by Karen Mitchell

Harry Domain - Scott Hicks
Sulla - Karen Mitchell
Marius - Kim Curtis
Helena Glory - Julie Ann Myers
Dr. Gall - Michael Miyazaki
Mr. Alquist - Steve Wilhite
Dr. Hallemeier - Michael Mack
Radius - Ron Woods
Helena - Sara M. Truog
Primus - Joshua Barrett

Fraudulent Productions does an engaging job of taking us back to the
future in Capek's it-wasn't-cliche-when-he-wrote-it cautionary tale.
"R. U. R." stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots," the last word of which
comes from the Czech word for "slave."  Rossum, now dead, has discovered a
way to create artificial people.  They have no souls and therefore aren't
really human.  In fact, they are better than human because they devote
themselves entirely to their work, thus freeing humans to do something
other than work.

You can predict the outcome, which involves a revolt, genocide, and one of
the first Last Men on Earth.  What beguiles here is not the script; the
play's the thing.  This is a minimalist production of a play that
premiered 80 years ago.  Who knows what it was like then, or how fresh it
might have been?  Today, it is a vision of how, as Fred Pohl might have
put it, the future used to be.  Remember, Capek had never seen or heard of
a computer.  His robots are extensions, not of our inventions, but of
ourselves.  Fraudulent's version has them speaking in slightly modulated
monotones, as all good robots do.  They even dress in spandex and capped
sleeves.  Yet, as a live performance, they cross the barrier that
encircled poor digital Jar-Jar Binks and even Robbie.  They are truly the
artificial people Capek had in mind.  You can see them up close in the DC
Arts Center's 50-seat theater.  Are they human?  Are they machines?  How
could anyone tell?

The set greets you as you sit, almost, in it.  There is a simple desk with
a set of large buttons mounted in it.  An old-style telephone, but with an
antenna, rests there.  Fritz Lang is watching from the wings...  Let your
eyes close and listen to the atmospheric music play before the show
begins.  You are there, again, in the sheet-steel future that we never
achieved.  As the story begins, you learn the history of the robots.  You
learn their promise and their threat.  And their curse.  They are simply
machines who only look like humans.

Helena Glory, daughter of the president, comes to teach them humanity.
She is not the first, and Harry Domain, R. U. R.'s senior manager, openly
laughs at her ambitions.  But, starved himself for human contact, Domain
falls in love with Glory, and marries her.  She is also loved, to one
degree or another, by the company's scientists.  All, it seems, have spent
a bit too much time with robots.

Soon, the robots go beyond Glory's wishes, not only assuming individual
identities, but seeing humankind as their mortal enemy.  Revolt, then
revenge, overtake humanity.  Everyone dies before the end, save one
engineer who is ordered to find the answer to the problem of the robots'
limited life span, and lost secret of reproduction.

The play starts slowly, with stilted performances by actors who seem not
to know what emotions they are displaying.  Perhaps the hinted roboticness
they show is deliberate.  But, by the second of four acts, the story
becomes compelling and the performance is swept along by its momentum.
Slight changes in set (arranged in near-darkness by actors who remain
in-character as robots) help build a sense of evolution towards defeat.
Emotions rise and become near, then real, hysteria.  In the tiny DCAC
theater, widened eyes and shrill voices do not seem like simple acting.
There is a sense conveyed by these performers that something awful is
happening just behind the audience, where they stare in terror.

Towards the end, there are more robots on stage than humans.  The last
human is a bit crazed and so the robots are the ones who carry the story
to its end.  Two, in particular, show what will become of the Earth as it
passes from human to robot hands.  They may, but only may, have learned
something of human values.  Perhaps they will become humanity's
inheritors.  It is not a certain thing.  But, the actors move their
characters from robots to... something more, if not fully human, and close
enough that a cold form of hope mounts the stage, just before the last
lights-out.  One moment, perhaps not in Capek's script, has two robots
trying to laugh together.  Their attempt is agonizingly strained, as
sincerity competes with mockery in the perfectly unified sounds of two
machines trying to act like people.  This short scene, even without any
dialog, evoked the essence of what "R. U. R." has to say, and showed a
moment of rare talent.

I was pleased to see this play, having known of it for the last 25 years.
It is, perhaps, the first SF play and, if one can remember that its
cliches were not yet known in 1920, it seems an inventive and
thought-provoking entry in the genre.  There are far too few SF stage
plays, and this one, along with its cast, proves there should be more.

%A Capek, Karel
%T R. U. R.
%I Fraudulent Productions
%D 1999-09