The Brooklyn Rail

In We Are Your Robots, creator and performer Ethan Lipton, performing as a robot who looks and sounds a whole lot like creator and performer Ethan Lipton, shares, from his digitized well of encyclopedic knowledge, that his favorite word is mencolek.

It’s an Indonesian word, he says, that translates to a trick where someone taps you on the shoulder from behind to fool you. It’s a culture-transcending gesture that also mirrors, in two new productions, how robots want us to see them: foreign yet familiar, goofy but innocuous. These musicals—We Are Your Robots at Theatre for a New Audience (in a co-production with Rattlestick Theater) and Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway—forward a history of robot representation on stage and, in a time of anxiety around artificial intelligence, grant more warmth than worry.

Robots were born in the theater, at least nominally. Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1920 science fiction play R.U.R. introduced the term robot and its mechanical, tinlike stereotype.

A century later, robots have taken more varied and evolved forms: as “primes,” or optimized, human-like versions of people after they die, in Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime (2014); as a professor recruiting others to robotize themselves in Francesca Talenti’s The Uncanny Valley (2014); as a wisdom-gathering computer-companion to take care of an ailing patient in Francisco Mendoza’s Machine Learning (2024); as a dancer performing the rote choreography that is assembly line labor in Dominique Morriseau’s Skeleton Crew (2016); and even as the animatronic, singing partner—named Karen—of a devious cyclops copepod in the musical SpongeBob SquarePants (2016).

Each of these robots exuded their own physicality and soundscape, with quiddities as idiosyncratic as their creators. Lipton’s robot has his own charms. In his newest work (with music composed and performed by his fellow band/bot mates, Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy, and Ian Riggs), he speaks to the audience, mano a mano, to bring two races closer. There’s a lot of agita about this whole robot thing, so he butters up with some compliments.

Despite human folly, he shares, it’s pretty astounding that we’ve doubled our lifespan in just a few hundred years. “And,” he says, “you invented frozen yogurt.”

Lipton presents his robot persona undisguised, as any other version would be less believable. The internet has become the Information Age’s general practitioner, so we turn to it to better know ourselves via WebMD, #GRWMs, and personality quizzes galore. Maybe, if Lipton tells us he’s a robot, we’ll listen more carefully.

People are reeling from an election, AI may replace human care, the times are getting more tumultuous. What should we do with all these feelings? “Hey man,” Lipton says. “Keep having ’em.”

In word and inflection, Lipton offers an avuncular android: a sweet everyman with a gracious if enviable ease. (What human hasn’t craved that?) If you can imagine The Guy from High Maintenance as a robot, Lipton has a similar effect.

And it’s a strategic one. Like his personality, the music is meant to be clever (but not too pointed) and accessible (but not tasteless). As such, the songs resemble nifty jams a live band might play at a bar you visit on a special occasion. They can sit in the background, but if you lean in, you’ll have to resist the temptation to sway.

To assert the human, the instrumentation favors whimsy: there’s a tenor sax and a melodica and an upright bass. Though these robots sing, theirs is not a synth sonic realm: electropop resurged in the 2000s, but if robots are to be the figures of the future, and if old trends continually resurface, perhaps acoustic music, never really out of style, will have its own revival.

Such analogue scoring is similarly found in Will Aronson and Hue Park’s Maybe Happy Ending: mournful strings and punchy brass storytell the lives of two obsolete Helperbots, Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen). These robots, like the title character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021), accompany humans in ways that blur the line between servant and friend.

Oliver is a Helperbot Level 3 and Claire a Level 5; at each increasing stage, the Helperbots become more humanlike. Oliver speaks in slightly jerky patterns, and Claire in more fluid ones. Besides her need to stay tethered to a charger to stay alive, she’s just like you and me.

Still, she seems and sounds more anthropoid than another character in the musical, Gil Brentley (Dez Duron), a famous human crooner whom Oliver adores. If Helperbots are striving for an ideal that is human, what ideal do humans strive for? For some, stardom. That can mean becoming a character.

Claire is more convincing as a human than Gil because Gil is, as a celebrity, meant to transcend humanness and present something greater: he’s not so much a jazz singer as a jazzy one, hinting at a genre in a pleasing manner. He calls to mind Michael Bublé in the way that Bublé calls to mind Frank Sinatra; Gil dances across sparkling notes with a lighthearted air, but the timbre is more an imitation of a style than a style itself, an approximation of what a nightclub audience may want to hear. It is a game of perception: while Claire is striving, Gil is performing, and those efforts dictate how they present their voices to the world.

For the Helperbots, technological level also dictates vocal quality. Claire and Oliver share a duet sitting in a car; they’re side-by-side lovebirds (lovebots?) who won’t admit their feelings, a tableau and sentiment that echoes the bench scene from Carousel’s “If I Loved You.” In their number, as throughout the musical, Shen sings with vibrato while Criss employs straight tone. She, as the advanced Helperbot, has a more varied musical toolbox.

Not that vibrato is the only marker of human singing; Lipton is known for his talky singing voice, which lends his robot a folksy energy.

Of the greatest gifts humans can offer, “You gave us uncertainty,” Lipton says.

He may be speaking to the audience, or to his producers: We Are Your Robots is TFANA’s first musical (even if it leans more concert-like), and, by partnering with Rattlestick, a new-play generator, TFANA is also pivoting from its mission and producing a world premiere unrelated to classical texts.

Post-pandemic, off-Broadway theaters continue to be in their own fog of uncertainty: financial constraints, shuttering venues, and morphing audiences have forced more than one institution to confront its ideals. Playwrights Horizons has more handily embraced solo works, and Under the Radar has evolved beyond the Public Theater with multiple other non-profit venues hosting its programming.

Change may come, perhaps in mechanical forms, but, for now, docile robots are here to mollify. “May you be happy 80 percent of the time,” Lipton sings over and over again.

He also invites the audience to speak aloud some key phrases—“world peace,” “improved hip flexibility.” Our devices are listening, after all, and the information they feed us is based on the information we feed them.

Still in control, we—the flawed, mortal water sacks—can offer the robots more hope.