Helen J. Shen and Darren Criss in Maybe Happy Ending. Photo: Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman
As AI becomes more prevalent, we encounter new ethical quandaries. What decisions should we abdicate to machines? What does society owe those who lose their jobs to AI? What happens if the machines become smarter than us? The creators of Maybe Happy Ending, now playing on Broadway, are asking a question most probably haven’t considered: When robots gain sentience, what will we owe them?
Set in the not-too-distant future, Maybe Happy Ending follows Oliver (Darren Criss), an outmoded Helperbot living in a housing complex for retired machines and waiting for his owner, James (Marcus Choi), to come back for him. One day, next door neighbor Claire (Helen J Shen), a slightly less out-of-date but still obsolete android, knocks on his door to borrow his charger. Hers has stopped working and the company has stopped making replacement parts for these antiquated models.
At first Oliver wants nothing to do with his neighbor, but he slowly warms to the friendly, persistent Claire. When she discovers his plan to visit the owner who abandoned him, she offers to drive him. The two set off on a road trip and, despite many disappointments along the way, they fall in love.
Both Shen and Criss do very good work acting and singing, earnestly selling a love story that could easily feel maudlin in other hands. But the stars of the show are Dane Laffrey’s mesmerizing sets. The technicians who have executed Laffrey’s design and flawlessly run what has to be an extremely complex show deserve no end of accolades. Of course, Laffrey deserves his share of credit for conceiving the visual landscape, along with technically adept, crisp lighting design by Ben Stanton and beautifully balanced sound from designer Peter Hylenski. Director Michael Arden takes full advantage of the space, building fluid transitions between the realistic sets of Oliver and Claire’s living spaces and their less literal counterparts elsewhere in the playworld.
Despite the rich visuals and strong performances, the show left me cold. Will Aronson and Hue Park have conceived a fantastic world but don’t get much out of their terrific premise. Perhaps that is because the moral conflict, what we owe to the machines we’ve created, is held by characters largely absent: Oliver and Claire’s former owners. We see these humans represented in larger-than-life projections (designed by George Reeve with help from set designer Laffrey; like the other visual components, the video projection is stunning), but only in the past. We only get the echo of the quandary as we see the effect their decisions have on their automated former companions.
The love story, though sweet, feels incomplete. I found myself distracted by far too many questions. What does Claire see in Oliver? Am I supposed to be charmed by the potted plant who Oliver calls his best friend? Can robots have sex? Why do I care how AI feels about AI?
To be fair, many questions floating in my head had nothing to do with the show: Are we barreling headfirst toward fascism? Will the country be able to recover from the nihilism and graft of the coming four years? Here I have to apologize to the robots and their human creators. I came to the show hoping to forget about the election and lose myself in a fun musical. I was unable to do so. I’m not sure how much of that is the fault of Maybe Happy Ending.
Still, while I applaud the creativity and originality of the production from concept to execution, the musical fails to rise to some of the challenges it sets up for itself. A Broadway musical with only two characters (there are a few other minor figures but mostly it’s just Criss and Shen on stage) is daring, but with only so many permutations musically for two singers, all the songs start to sound the same. A few numbers start off promising but the melodies never develop into anything interesting. Dez Duron plays a fifties crooner with a voice so delicious you want to spread it on toast, but his character doesn’t have anything to do with the action, so his songs drag. Other musical numbers, whatever my objections, do advance the story concisely, producing a run time under two hours.
Incidentally, for those who have read Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, Maybe Happy Ending might strike a familiar chord. Klara follows an almost human AI robot and touches on many of the same issues: abandonment, responsibility, robot replacement theory, parent-child relationships. Though it might seem Maybe Happy Ending borrowed liberally from Ishiguro, the show’s Seoul premiere predates the 2021 book by five years. Perhaps Ishiguro was inspired by the musical, rather than the reverse?