Ben
Brantley

January 9, 2015

Though it is a tale told by an automaton, there is nothing remotely inhuman about Sorry Robot, which opened at the New Ohio Theater on Thursday night as part of the 2015 Coil festival of experimental theater. On the contrary, this gleeful, ramshackle tale of a not-too-distant future in which machines are our very best friends and our mortal enemies (or has that day already arrived?) is only and all too human. That’s a compliment. Written and composed by Mike Iveson, a staple of downtown theater making his debut as a playwright, Sorry Robot is smart, silly, sloppy and, at moments, joltingly insightful. Like many of my favorite people, this musical sci-fi noir is a charming mess, spilling over with original thoughts and getting higher all the time on its own increasingly far-fetched ideas, until suddenly it all starts to make excellent sense. This play, directed with endearing haphazardness by Will Davis, could surely never have been written by a computer program. Or maybe (sinister chord here, please) it could have been. Narrated by a lifelike but lifeless synthetic creature named Junius (Mr. Iveson), Sorry Robot follows the investigation of Isaac Crownover (Anthony R. Brown), “a high-ranking detective at the Department of U.S. Justice,” into a project to make robots seem more like us — that is, more fallible. (Mr. Iveson’s script was inspired by a story in The Economist about programming imperfection into robots to make them less intimidating to humans.)