You know you’re in for something special the moment you enter the lobby. There are three sections with some artificial intelligence all-stars, some of whom you’ll recognize immediately, some of whom are a complete mystery and some that tickle your recollection. What they all have in common is their interactions with humanity and this is at the heart of brilliant award winning play by José Rivera, who also directs. Fans of speculative art from Isaac Asimov through HBO’s Westworld will see the modern impact of the advent of artificial intelligence.
Piercing the intellect as well as emotion, there are so many questions – how will we age and who will take care of us? Can we trust the machines upon which our lives depend? How does that change the quality of our interactions? We meet Aislin (Anne O’Sullivan) when she is just meeting her new caretake Stacy (Sara Koviak) for the first time. Aislin’s son has contracted with a service that has provided Stacy – the latest in adaptive technology. Stacy will endure where a myriad of human caretakers could not – Aislin is feisty. This is not an elder-thing, Aislin has always been feisty. There is a deep vein of love that hides beneath that crusty exterior. What happens next is full of twists, turns and truly memorable performances.
The resident creative team has knocked everything out of the park. Nick Simone’s sound design including pre-curtain music, and during and after show is spot-on perfection. Patricia Doherty’s costumes give subtle, and not, clues to what’s going on inside and Jessica Parks’ set has a Cubist meets Magritte feel while the inside of Aislin’s home is a lived-in mixture of vintage and quasi-modern with a subtle yin-yang effect in the paneling on audience right. Or is it a sine wave charting the fluctuations experienced by woman and machine? See the show, to see for yourself.
Ms. O’Sullivan’s Aislin comes right out of the gate chewing nails and spitting tacks. She’s got a lifetime of travail behind her and the idea of her becoming less and less able to fend for herself is writ large in all she does. Supremely expressive, Aislin’s range of emotions travel across her face like clouds and sun on a windy summer day. Ms. Koviak’s Stacy is a master class in physical control and emotional nuance. We see Stacy changing in leaps and bounds and some of the leaps give salient reminders of the strength within the winsome exterior. Rivera’s story telling is sweeping and he wrote this play for these two actors. In watching it, it would be hard to imagine any other performers in this gem of a microworld with macro implications. Bits of the production will come to you for days afterward, the facets of the show are so many and so deep. There are only a handful of shows remaining, gather your friends and GO!
Get your tickets here: https://njrep.org/show/your-name-means-dream/ . This show runs through November 24 only. See it, and be changed.