Vito Dieterle, Ian Riggs, Ethan Lipton, and Eben Levy in We Are Your Robots. Photo: HanJie Chow

I saw two musicals populated by robots last week, both of them featuring human actors playing humanoids designed to be useful to humans, both of them presenting their stories from the robots’ point of view, and both of them with tiny casts. Beyond that, the two couldn’t be more different. Maybe Happy Ending, a confection of a pop musical, was a stage spectacle for two characters, a tender story of romance and technological obsolescence that felt sweet and winsome while I was watching it and melted from my mind like cotton candy on my way home; it’s mostly about death but it’s got an underlying cuteness that leaves you with a sentimental “aww” rather than real sadness. The ruefully philosophical We Are Your Robots, on the other hand, is a chamber piece that’s as much live concept album or illustrated lecture as stage musical, pushing the audience to think about what we humans want from our machines, how we’ll know when we’ve gotten it, and–most alarmingly–whether the singularity has in fact already taken place. And as befits a concert piece, its music is also stronger and richer, drawing less from musical theater tunes than from what the script calls “a fun combination of many unpopular genres”—in other words an amalgam of blues, jazz, rock, a few funky bass lines, a few wafty keyboards—all of it catchy, and all of it in the hands of an expert four-piece ensemble who’ve clearly been playing together for years. 

We Are Your Robots is funny, even goofy, and its preoccupations range from Noam Chomsky to deciphering whale songs to panpsychism to baseball legend Reggie Jackson–but it poses sobering questions about the information economy, privacy, and the fate of humanity. I’m still turning it over in my mind. 

Ethan Lipton (who wrote the book and lyrics and shares the music credit with Eben Levy, Ian Riggs, Vito Dieterle, the other three members of his longtime band, who also comprise the remaining cast) is a theatrical man of many talents—a playwright in the traditional sense; a singer-songwriter; front man of the quartet Ethan Lipton and His Orchestra, and creator of musical theater works that hit squarely at the intersection of all of the above. His musical theater persona, though, usually starts from a character very much like himself; there’s a personal story there even if it’s pushed past the real into the absurd. Here, we the audience–even we humans at large–are the protagonist. Ethan, his bandmates, and his Roomba grandfather (one of the show’s best bits; I won’t say any more about it) interrogate whether humanity yearns for immortality more or less than annihilation. Ethan spends the entire show soothing the audience, putting us at our ease and gaining our trust…punctuated with reminders that at every moment of our lives, we are “oozing data,” and the robots are only too eager to sop it up. 

In an interview published in the program, Lipton says, “I think I believed that tech was kind of inherently nefarious in some way, and that what humans are supposed to want is to get it under control. And what I ended up feeling was… that the real question is what do humans want for themselves?…Tech is a mirror for us. And what it’s going to do is just give us more power to do the things we’re already doing.” And the show never lets us forget that what we’re doing, what we’re capable of, is both spectacular and terrifying: we might yet save ourselves but we very well might just follow our current path toward the apocalypse.

Katherine Freer’s giant projection screen, showing a friendly cartoon-y robot face, welcomes us into the space, where Lee Jellinek’s set and Adam Honoré’s lighting sketch a vaguely mid-century modern cabaret, with bright, saturated colors in the lighting and each performer positioned on a low circular platform a little like a statue’s plinth. Director Leigh Silverman keeps the musicians static–they’re playing the whole time–and even Lipton mostly talks and sings from a downstage band comprising his spot and a few feet in either direction from it. The show is all about his ability to connect straight to the audience, and the few times he does wander elsewhere in the space, it almost feels like a distraction that breaks the suggestion of an animatronic ensemble encouraged by the set and the light metallic flourishes trimming the matching suits of Alejo Vietti’s costume design.

Projections lead us in, and will underscore the content throughout, in line with the aura of highly entertaining TED talk; Lipton’s script characterizes The Screens as almost a fifth character, helping the audience “feel their understanding” and also harvesting data from us. Given how integral they are, I might wish they’d been integrated into the design rather than looming gigantically above the action, but Freer and Silverman use them expertly to denote the mood and punctuate the text. The Screens give us the chance to configure our robot band—the “entertainment experience of a lifetime,” programmed to help us fulfill our purpose in life, if, y’know, we knew what that was. We “choose” an amateur therapist as our front man, and we get Ethan Lipton. Ethan and his band don’t act robotic in any way; they’re humanoid robots indistinguishable from ourselves to the naked eye, other than those little bits of metal trim. 

Which is kind of the point. We already didn’t know exactly where the line between human and animal, human and object, is: Consciousness, Ethan reminds us, is already almost impossible to measure: “How could a robot ever prove it’s conscious to people when people can’t even prove they’re conscious to each other?”

We are already symbiotic with our technology, We Are Your Robots posits—not just our phones (though, yes, definitely our phones), but our glasses, our eating utensils, our robot vacuums. Where did this conversation start, and where will it end? We may think that final fusion of human and machine has yet to occur, that we’ll get the choice of whether to let the nanobots into our bloodstreams…but we might be deluding ourselves. We might have already ceded our control—gently, trustingly—to mostly benign, mostly reliable, mostly safe androids, while they entertain us with saxophone solos. (Very good saxophone solos!)

The show is never overtly political in a partisan way, but it also never lets us forget how much of our decision making we’ve already outsourced to the techno-elite, how much data we ooze, how many terrible things humanity has wrought upon the world. But it also doesn’t let us forget how much we learn from one another, how much we’re learning right now, sitting here in this room together–and how much we might accomplish yet. If we can figure out how to work together. Robot Ethan retains the Everyman charm so familiar from other Ethan Lipton shows, and we believe he has our best interests at heart, with his gentle humor, his subtle encouragement. We want to believe it will all be okay, even as we know it very well might not be. 

Silverman says in the program interview: “Their humanity, as robots, is what the audience wants.” That humanity is what we go to the theater for: an “ancient technology” that “moves the species forward by fostering small collaborations across communities.” As long as we’re still hiring humans to play robots rather than the other way around, maybe all is not lost.