Review: ABACUS from Red Rover Theatre Company

Dear Readers, it looks like we have a new show topic trend hitting us square in our CPU, artificial intelligence and how it’s becoming more and more a part of our world.  There’s a new musical about robots falling in love about to start on Broadway.  And in the last week I’ve seen two shows in this vein, the latest, “Abacus” by Duane Kelly from Red Rover Theatre Company, currently playing at West of Lenin, is sweet but needs more and less to say simultaneously. 

In Kelly’s play set in the not-too-distant future we have an aging academic, Winston (Michael Winters), who needs more and more home care due to his increasing dementia, which includes his frequent conversations with long deceased poet Matthew Arnold (Bill Johns).  More care than his wife, Jane (Diana Trotter), can give especially with his occasional violent outbursts.  So, after Jane goes away due to the latest outburst, Winston’s son Max (Nik Doner), the CEO of a tech company, decides to beta test his new synthetic home helper replicant by making it look just like his mom to see if it can convince Winston it’s the real Jane.  But, as they always seem to, the replicant develops a kind of soul during its stay, leading to complications.

My first issue with this new play is it didn’t really have much new to say.  These are the same tropes we’ve seen in TV and movies from “The Twilight Zone” to “I Robot” to “Short Circuit” to name a few.  Theatre too has seen its share with the likes of the beautiful “Marjorie Prime” or even “R.U.R” which is over 100 years old (and incidentally featured the first use of the word “robot”).  So maybe this isn’t a new trend at all, just a resurgence of an existing one.

My second issue was Kelly’s insistence on over lengthy and poetic language throughout.  Maybe due to the inclusion of the Matthew Arnold character, which they had to explain to the audience who he was in some heavy-handed exposition as well as a bio of him in the program, but the flowery language just made the play feel much longer than it needed to be.  He might think about some serious edits.

Don’t get me wrong, the play has its moments and on the whole is a sweet and sometimes tragic story of a family dealing with the mental decline of a loved one.  But then, that was another issue I had.  What is this play about?  The dementia issue?  Caring for the elderly?  An AI coming to terms with mortality?  Or just that the robots will eventually replace us all?  It felt a bit all over the place and never quite landed on an over-arching point.

The cast does an admirable job.  Johns is fine as the delusion of Arnold but doesn’t amount to much more than an often unnecessary sounding board.  Trotter has some lovely moments but is saddled with the majority of her time as the replicant with a stilted, robotic cadence that’s difficult to make engaging for two hours.  Doner brings in some fine elements as the son more concerned with the bottom line of his invention than his own family, but he too is hampered by repetitive moments as he keeps explaining how if the replicant fails then his company will fail too.  Winters, with some of the strongest moments of the piece, does a lovely job portraying a man at odds with his own decaying mind.  And director David Gassner does a fine job staging in such a small venue, but I do question the constant opening and closing of a curtain to change the scene in one locale when a light change would have sufficed.  It killed the pace at times.

Overall, we have a heartfelt show with potential, in need of a trim and something new to say about the rise of the machines.  And so, with my three-letter rating system, I give “Abacus” from Red Rover Theatre Company a “didn’t quite hit the mark” MEH-.  We’re seeing more and more of these shows with technological bends coming around again, and with AI becoming an increasingly advanced presence, I think we’ll see even more. 

“Abacus” from Red Rover Theatre Company performs at West of Lenin through September 28th.  For tickets or information visit them online at www.redrovertheatre.com.

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