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Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Black Bone' by Definition Theatre looks at race and artificial intelligence
How will the rise of artificial intelligence impact the place of race in American politics and culture? Not at all, might be the most obvious answer, but a new play from Definition Theatre in Hyde Park suggests that the truth may end up being a lot more complicated, especially once carbon-based humans are forced to make space for increasingly pervasive AI representations. We're already familiar with white people who pretend to be people of color, usually for a perceived personal benefit. 'Black Bone,' written by Tina Fakhrid-Deen, suggests that such a deception might soon be a whole lot easier to pull off. 'Black Bone' has come out of Definition's Amplify Series, a development process for new work. I should note at the outset that Fakhrid-Deen has packed more levels into this play than it can easily withstand and, at almost two hours without an intermission, the show is way too long. But it's certainly a provocative piece of writing and a new work that I hope Definition further develops. Set some ways into the future, the outer frame of the show is a futuristic and over-the-top game show, setting the audience up for the kind of heightened reality that recalls George C. Wolfe's classic satire, 'The Colored Museum.' Adding to that, Fakhrid-Deen has added a video screen that plays spoof news broadcasts and commercials, as generated by artificial intelligence. But I think what Fakhrid-Deen wanted to write about here was a satire of higher education, focused on how Black academics have to operate in predominantly white institutions and how that may or may not change for the better or the worse in years to come. The TV show frame doesn't bring much to the party here in my view and, frankly, it's too easy and familiar a target and ends up diluting the potential force of some of the fresher content. But once we're firmly in the scenes set in the faculty lounge and actors like the excellent Martasia Jones, Marlene Slaughter and Matthew Lolar-Johnson get fired up in director Carla Stillwell's very alive production, the show finds its feet. It's really exploring a timeless debate: the merits of working within the system versus taking it down. But it's also fresh and confident writing. If 'Black Bone' could lose the outer frame and the video screen and just explore how race will impact the practice of higher education when academics have to worry about 'professor bots' rather than adjuncts taking over, this play would really attract some attention. Even more interestingly, Fakhrid-Deen has set up a world where America's current political polarization is just the beginning. In 'Black Bone,' America is riven not by the debate over reparations but over the consequence of that initiative having taken place, especially in an AI-capable world where race now can be performed far more easily for individual gain and truly lived experience gets all too easily forgotten. It's certainly a dystopian vision of the future but a credible one. If Fakhrid-Deen just commits to the truth of what she wants to say in those scenes and loses the rest, she could have a 90-minute drama filled with fresh thinking about how our ever-contested present morphs into an inevitably similar future. Review: 'Black Bone' (2.5 stars) When: Through June 29 Where: Definition Theatre, 1160 E. 55th St. Running time: 2 hours Tickets: $15-$35 (plus fees) at
Chicago Tribune
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: In ‘The Antiquities' at the Goodman Theatre, what becomes of our future selves?
If you view all of those Silicon Valley kids messing around with artificial intelligence for fun and profit as kindling flames that will not only disrupt but destroy the human race, then 'The Antiquities' is your kind of show. At one point in playwright Jordan Harrison's dystopian drama at the Goodman Theatre — a play that has more to say in 95 minutes than most TV shows manage in eight seasons — a character who looks uncomfortably like Sam Bankman-Fried is messing around with AI somewhere in the early years of the 21st century, trying to make its interface as reassuringly human and intimate as possible but blithely clueless as to the consequences of his actions. And since 'The Antiquities' ping-pongs between multiple different eras from the 19th to 21st centuries (there are a lot of short scenes), Harrison is able to provide snapshots of the earliest days of techno-danger (such as the AOL dial-up moment) and their connection to his imagined future where humans can no longer find any purpose in their lives. As one of the defunct notes, sadly: 'If they can do everything that makes me me, what's the point of myself?' I'm not yet willing to admit defeat to Siri or ChatGPT, but I did read a report before starting this review that Apple was working on technology that would allow people to control its products with their thoughts. All very pro-humanoid, of course. 'The Antiquities' suggests a different future where it is the products that do the controlling. I kept thinking about George C. Wolfe's famous dramatic satire 'The Colored Museum.' This play could be called 'The Human Museum.' Or, 'How Humans Wrought Their Own Destruction.' I've long been of the view that if you are going to take yourself to the theater, with all the attendant hassle, you should see something that either provides you with a blissful escape from reality or something with sufficient stakes that it really engages the brain. As co-directed by David Cromer, who has had huge success this spring with 'Good Night, and Good Luck' and 'Dead Outlaw' (see the common theme?), this Goodman Theatre production certainly falls into the latter category. And it is superlatively acted by an ensemble cast that first performed this show at Playwrights Horizons in New York: Marchánt Davis, Layan Elwazani, Andrew Garman, Helen Joo Lee, Thomas Murphy Molony, Aria Shahghasemi, Kristen Sieh, Ryan Spahn and Amelia Workman. All are unstintingly committed. But Sieh is the standout, emitting a complex blend of sardonic acceptance, cynical verbosity and submerged emotional longing. It's kind of a hot combination these days, given the number of theater and TV shows out there worrying about the future and imagining that humans will have a lot more competition. In the Broadway musical 'Maybe Happy Ending,' for example, we meet two robots for whom battery life is a proxy for mortality. In 'The Antiquities,' we learn of not only the hubris and carelessness that might get us to that point, but also the existential crises that will then afflict the non-humanoids running the world. I mean, it's logical that said beings will wonder to each other if it was better to be able to live and die than live forever. After all, we will have created them. They are likely to have some of our neuroses and our penchant for nostalgia. They're likely to wonder what it must have been like to deal with the limitations of an aging, non-renewable body. Wherein we have no choice but to reside. Maybe these bots will arrive at the conclusion that only by understanding humans will they be able to understand themselves. If this kind of contemplation of an evening is not your thing, this is not your kind of show. Unlike 'Maybe Happy Ending,' neither Harrison nor Cromer coats any of these implications with any sentimentality or romanticism. No love balm or sweet ballads here. Rather, they offer chilly but intensely detailed snapshots of specific causal moments on the heedless path to destruction. For those of us of a certain age, the show's several scenes in the 1980s and 1990s put those memories into more of a linear context, or that at least was my experience watching this piece. Oh, that was the start of that, you find yourself thinking, as you watch a family marveling over their first dial-up and their one computer talking to another. I think the most interesting aspect of this play is how logically it arrives at its central conclusion that humans will no longer have self-worth or control, assuming things continue as they are going. Big tech, of course, sells every innovation as beneficial to us carbon-based masters of our own universe; 'The Antiquities' very much suggests otherwise. Simply put, your head will spin for 95 minutes. And then you'll worry more about the human trajectory, maybe arriving (as did I) at the notion that we really do spend our time obsessing over entirely the wrong things. Review: 'The Antiquities' (4 stars) When: Through June 1 Where: Goodman's Owen Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes Tickets: $33-$73 at 312-443-3800 and
