In the year 2051, a bilingual robot named Bob has disguised himself as a human being (a species not yet extinct) and descended twenty levels underground to the Gold Vault of the Federal Bank of New York in Manhattan, where he starts debating monetary policy with Xavier, a former official with the Federal Reserve, who for the last decade has stayed underground overseeing the vault’s five thousand tons of gold.
Bob has signed on as Xavier’s intern but secretly he works as a researcher with the Human Research Institute; his mission is to learn why humans are guarding this hoard of useless, outdated metal, while everybody now just uses cryptocurrency. He also wants to understand why humans are so prejudiced against the robot community.
The world created for Bob and Xavier and the other characters in “Destination Undefined” features some intriguing elements and some clever touches.
Robots as well as humans experience unemployment, and some of the former have become “robo hobos” – slang for decommissioned units. “They aren’t robots in any official sense anymore,” Bob says. “They’re cut loose, barely surviving on public outlets” – which could well have been the eventual dark fate of Oliver and Claire in “Maybe Happy Ending” had the creative team of that musical chosen to give it a maybe unhappy ending. A little more confusingly, robots have a representative in Congress, yet during the course of the play lose a ballot initiative that would have given them the right to vote. But if humans discriminate against robots, many also install a “Rubicon chip” in their own bodies in order to emulate them.
But “Destination Undefined” is so overstuffed with notions and themes and concerns that the story that is supposed to drive the play feels like an afterthought. Niche science fiction fans might not mind that the play devolves into the hoariest of plot devices – there is an explosion that traps the five main characters in the Gold Vault, forcing them to try to find an escape together — but long before the end of its two hour running time (without an intermission!), I too felt trapped.
I say the five main characters, because there is a prologue and epilogue in which the five-member cast portrays five different characters in the year 2564. These are beings of pure Artificial Intelligence, all members of the Human Research Institute charged with understanding the now-extinct human species (reminiscent of the set-up in Jordan Harrison’s play The Antiquities.) One is descended from ChatGPT; another less stable AI character is coded in Fortran (an in-joke for programmers and old people with good memories.) The five of them discover a magic cube labeled “human consciousness” that dates from 500 years earlier…
Let me interrupt the retelling of the plot to point out that the playwright, Changshuo Liu, has a BA from Princeton University in Theater, Mathematics, and Computer Science. and currently works as an “investment professional” – and that these impressive credentials nevertheless pale beside those of some of the other founders of Cellunova, the two-year-old theater company that is mounting the production. The founders are a group of first generation immigrant artists, many of whom have PhDs or other advanced degrees from Ivy League universities. One of them (Jianing Zhao, the play’s choreographer!) knows eight languages. This leads me to the dispiriting thought that much of “Destination Undefined” may simply be over my head.
In any case, after the prologue, we are in 2051, with Xavier (Tom Shane), Bob (Victor Gao), Robert (Chisom Awachie), who is Bob’s computer chip (or inner voice or memory), and stands beside what I take to be the character’s robotic embodiment, reminiscent of the squeakily beeping mini-fridge on wheels in the old Lost in Space TV series; Grace (Lyra Lys) Xavier’s co-worker, and Emily (Jueun Kang), Grace’s daughter, who is an intern along with Bob. Emily’s life is just as precarious as Bob’s because, although she was born in the United States, birthright citizenship has been revoked. (One theme I did catch is the connection the playwright makes about the societal prejudice towards anybody viewed as an outsider, be they robot or immigrant.)
Cellunova makes good use of the space at Theater 154. Kudos go to the designers for helping us visualize this complicated world on a small stage
In the lobby before the play began, we were asked to scan a QR code and answer “eight strange questions” to “uncover the kind of intelligence you’ve become. An Emulator? A Glitch Prophet? A Rebel?” The first question was: “A boot loop ends. A choice begins. A voice crackles through the static: “Can you hear me?” The choices were: Remain silent and observe. Respond in binary. Say “I think therefore I lag?” Ask: “Am I alive.”
The company also put on the wall in the lobby a series of front pages from an imagined newspaper from the future The Daily Glitch: “AI Therapy Pets Banned from Emergency Contact,” “National Weather App Confesses It’s Been Guessing,”
My hope is that the guy responsible for the funny headlines beats out the one who came up with the incomprehensible QR quiz, when Cellunova assigns the rewriting (and maybe the renaming) of Destination Undefined
Destination Undefined
Theater 154 through September 7
Running time: Two hours with no intermission
Tickets: $40
Written by Changshuo Liu
Directed by Yibin Wang
Scenic design/robot design by Qingan Zhang, costume design by Nuzza Qiuyi Li, lighting design by Sophia Zhu, projection design/engineering by Qixin Zhang, sound design by Sophie Yuqing Nie, robotic engineer Youqi Gang, choreographer by Jianing Zhao
Cast: Victor Gao as Bob/Max, Juen Kang as Emily/Jane, Tom Shane as Xavier/Lee,Lyra Lys as Grace/Q, Chisom Awachie as Robert/Kay, Aida Mohamed understudy
Photos by Ziru Wang
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