The Feast theater company is set to stage Elmer Rice’s 1923 play The Adding Machine in a new production titled The Adding Machine: A Cyborg Morality Play. The show began performances on September 12th, at The Lee Center for the Arts on Seattle University’s campus. Performances run through October 6th, 2024.
The Seattle Times reports that the production integrates generative artificial intelligence into its scenic and costume design. It also employs chatbot tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, to create characters that interact with the play’s five human actors. Throughout the performance, actors will prompt the AI tools onstage and receive responses via text or voice in real time. While approximately 80% of the play’s text remains fixed, the remaining portions require the cast to improvise during these AI interactions.
“[The play] is a really interesting look at what happens when technology is moving faster than we’re comfortable with,” said Ryan Guzzo Purcell, The Feast’s founding artistic director and director of the …