Your play, Universal Robots, is based on another play. Which one, and what inspired you to do your own adaptation of it?
Universal Robots is based on the Czech playwright Karel Capek's 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the play that introduced the word "robot," and the concept of robots, to the world.
To be honest, I was inspired partly by how much I liked Capek's play, but even more by how much I didn't like it. I randomly bought a one dollar used copy of the play somewhere in the City and almost didn't get through it. The lengthy prologue is mostly taken up by surreal slapstick, and much of the remainder was kind of a chore for me. It's set in Allegoryland, rather than any kind of setting that felt tangible in any way, each of the characters was a stand-in for some kind of force in our society — they might as well have been named Capitalism, Science, Superstition, etc. — and all of the significant developments seem to take place offstage, or between acts. (There's one hilarious exchange that goes something like, "Do you ever feel bad, darling?" "Why, about what, dear?" "Why, that those robots you manufactured caused all those awful wars!")
My interest only started to prickle when I got to the incredible final scene, where the recently exterminated human race is redeemed through their creations. Two robots, Helena and Primus, who have secretly fallen in love, see another robot die for the first time, and this realization of mortality intensifies their love to the point where, moments later, in a situation of extreme duress, they each offer to die for the other without a second's hesitation. The last human alive sees all this take place, and realizes that life on Earth will go on.
On the one hand, this is extremely powerful, in a simple, elemental way. The knowledge of certain death — and of the possibility that that death will be violent — creates in human beings the need to love one another, and to procreate, and to band together to build societies that hope to offer protection and comfort. On the other hand, I found the scene, for all its power to be unsatisfying. Why do the robots love each other? Earlier in the play a scientist, on the request of the woman he loves, gives the robots "souls," but Capek never attempts to explain how he does that, even in a faux sci-fi manner. Also, why will life now go on? The last human, an old laborer, says to them, "Go Adam, go Eve. The world is yours." But Adam and Eve could procreate. Can the robots? That hasn't been established in the play. They love each other, sure, but love doesn't make children — genitals and wombs do.
You have to understand, I grew up a science fiction dork, and while science fiction rarely offers explanations that would stand up to the scrutiny of actual, y'know, science, the best science fiction extrapolates from what we know of human nature, offering scenarios that feel grounded in emotional reality. So it bugged me to read what I regarded as a kick-ass ending to a play that wasn't prepared for by what we had seen before. Twist endings have to feel inevitable in retrospect, or they don't work.
This really got to me, and I kept thinking about the play. I read several other translations. I eventually decided to write an adaptation, one that would retain the final scene but lay the groundwork for it more carefully. To prepare, I read Ivan Klima's amazing biography of Capek which turned the whole project upside down.
What I learned from Klima's book was that Capek's life was at least as interesting as his plays, if not more so. He came to prominence in the newly created Republic of Czechoslovakia in the wake of World War I, and was a hands-on, active participant in the social and political life of his country. He was close friends with the new President, Tomas Masaryk, despite their difference in age and the fact that Masaryk was a devout Christian while Capek was an agnostic.
I was particularly fascinated by the fact that Capek was a liberal who rejected right wing nationalism and communism alike, seeing that extreme creeds, no matter how different in content, will, if unchecked, lead to the exact same tyranny and bloodshed. As one who had witnessed the miracles of the Industrial Revolution applied to the machinery of a massive war, he was also highly suspicious of sweeping scientific or technological solutions, which he felt functioned similarly to idealistic revolutions. Capek believed that the salvation of the human race lay in the diversity of people and the messiness of democracy. He published columns several days a week, wrote novels, plays, and short stories, and worked at the very center of his culture, rather than at the fringes, where we ordinarily imagine artists to reside.
And then, of course, the Nazis came along and it was all swept away. Capek died knowing his nascent country was about to be overrun by the exact kind of dogmatic monsters that haunted his worst nightmares. (His brother and sometime co-writer, Josef, who came up with the word "robot," died in a concentration camp.) Certainly we all die disillusioned to some extent, but imagining Capek's deathbed heartbreak is mortally chilling. Everything he dreamed of was crashing down.
I was totally re-conceptualizing the play at this point. I didn't want to write an adaptation anymore. I had a whole new idea: a play about Capek — but not the real one, an imaginary Capek inspired by certain facets of the real one. I wanted to take aspects of his real life, and then mash them up with plot elements from R.U.R. to create a science fiction story about the enormous forces that radically change our societies, and the flawed, complex human beings who try to harness and steer those forces — while simultaneously laying the groundwork for that final scene I loved so much. It took me such a long time to finish it principally because it took me a long time to start. The idea had grown so grotesquely ambitious that I was frightened and embarrassed by it.
What were the advantages and challenges of writing an adaptation as opposed to writing something completely from scratch?
Well, I should say first of all that I don't think that Universal Robots as it finally came out functions as an adaptation. It certainly wouldn't exist without Capek's play, that's for sure, and the climactic scene follows roughly the same structure, but the whole rest of the play ended up playing out very differently. Almost none of the principals — Capek, his sister Jo, President Masaryk, even Rossum, actually — appear in R.U.R. Universal Robots is actually set in Czechoslovakia. If you read the two plays side by side, you can see that in terms of structure and dramatis personae, they're almost totally different.
That said, I still drew on a lot of stuff from R.U.R. The titular Rossum never appears in Capek's play, but reference is made to the fact that he was an eccentric-bordering-on-insane man who became estranged from his adult son over their conflicting ideas about what to do with the robot invention. I put these characters on stage and made their generational battle central to the plot. (In general, I like as much of the plot to happen on stage as possible. I've never been much for the messenger running into to announce that Oedipus has put his eyes out, or those David Allan Baker-type plays where two guys drink beer for an hour before one of them admits that he murdered his grandmother earlier that afternoon.)
The robot Radius is only a peripheral character with a cameo appearance in Capek's play. In the course of developing my play, I ended up amping him up to one of the tragic heroes, the revolutionary who ends up horrified by his own revolution. I was particularly interested in a line Capek gave him to say when he was announcing his revolt against the human race, which has been translated in many ways, but my favorite version was "You do unessential things." It's kind of the perfect rallying cry of the fanatic: anything you do that doesn't contribute directly to the fanatic's utopia is unessential. I think Capek felt — and I would agree with him — that much of what makes us human can be found in the unessential things we do. So I made "You do unessential things" the robot's anti-human revolutionary slogan.
The principal challenge, as I mentioned above, was making the science fiction stuff measure up to today's standards. No one — certainly not I — is going to accept, "Oh, could you please give the robots souls?" "Right away, my love!" As a dramatist and a sci-fi dork, I want to see the steps leading to a transformation. I wrote another play recently in which the whole second act was devoted to the tutoring of the Antichrist, to mapping each stage of transforming a child, psychologically, into an incipient dictator. I wanted to do the same thing here: if robots were going to develop emotions and solidarity with one another, I wanted to know how it would plausibly happen. After all, why would the humans give them emotions? I decided that empathy was the key. If the humans had a good reason to give robots the capacity to feel pain — and to recognize pain in other robots — that would be the seed of humanity.
The other big challenge was the fact that almost none of the characters in R.U.R. and almost none of the major players in Capek's life were women. I realized early on that I was looking at a total sausage party if I couldn't remake several of the leads into female characters, but I also didn't want to ignore the fact that it would have been quite difficult for a woman at that time to be in a position of power. So I ended up working it in such a way that the principal women became powerful through their innate scientific gifts (Rossum), artistic gifts (Jo), or political/administrative gifts (Rossum's daughter Helena).
How did you first become involved in theatre?
This one's way simpler. My parents noticed that I memorized swaths of text very quickly as a child, so my mother suggested that I audition for a local theater production of Oliver! when I was eight or nine. (As it turned out, memorizing was the only thing about theater that came easily to me.) At the same time, I started writing little science fiction short stories because I liked Doctor Who so much when I was a kid. Eventually those interests merged. I wrote several plays for my Unitarian Church youth group, which was a blessing because I was able to make my biggest and most embarrassing mistakes as a teenager for a very forgiving audience. Now I'm working on the medium-sized mistakes.
You have your own production company, Gideon Productions. What are the origins of the company and what kind of work do you all do?
Gideon basically came about because Sean Williams, a friend of mine from college, started dating Jordana Davis, another friend of mine from college, and just sort of decided that he wanted to make theater with the two of us. He actually called me up one day when he was still living in Los Angeles, and told me, "Here's my plan. I'm going to convince you and Jordana to move to L.A. and start a theater company with me." This was in 1999. He ended up achieving 50% of his original goal.
The fact that we still work together all these years later is partly a testament to our friendships, but also to our shared sensibilities. We like popular storytelling forms. We're more interested in entertainment than innovation. We're more interested in putting on a good show than doing a lot of acting exercises or whatever in rehearsal. We've sharpened our mission to specifically working with genre forms and giving them new spins. We work in much the same way we did at the UNC Chapel Hill Lab Theater where we first met — very DIY. Also, Jordana and Sean, as, respectively, a director and an actor, have a near-instinctive understanding of how to do my stuff. I don't work exclusively with Gideon (I've had a number of happy collaborations recently with Nosedive Productions, for example), but I can't imagine ever not working with Gideon.
By my count, at least three plays of yours were produced this year: Universal Robots; Hail Satan at FringeNYC 2007; and "Best Served Cold," which was part of Nosedive Productions's The Blood Brothers Present: Pulp. Did you intend to be so busy in 2007, or was it just a happy accident?
I'm not sure! The extreme busy-ness of 2007 caused me to crash and withdraw a little bit, to be honest, terrified of anything that looks like work. I have started full-on writing again, thanks to a shot in the arm from Dorothy Lemoult and Dan Trujillo's National Playwriting Month, but it's not clear yet how many productions I'll be involved in. I'll be working with Isaac Butler's Rapid Response Team. I'm writing three new plays, but they're coming sort of dismayingly slow.
I've never had the nonstop energy or killer instinct that a lot of successful showbiz people have.I get tired. I need time between shows to get drinks with people and watch DVDs on my computer. I don't have the desire or drive to go from project to project to project, but I admire the people who do.
You're also an actor. Are we going to be seeing you in anything soon?
Nosedive may remount The Adventures of Nervous-Boy at some point this year, and hopefully they'll want me back if those plans finalize. One of the two plays I'm working on has a part for me in it, but of course it isn't even finished yet. Otherwise, I don't have any concrete plans. I never work on my acting "career"; things just sort of come up. I have no desire to try to be a professional actor. Being an Off-Off unpaid guy allows me the privilege of only doing shows I want to do at times that I feel like doing them, and I get to be in really interesting new plays that professional actors rarely get to be in because professional theaters won't gamble on producing them. While I ultimately wish we lived in a world where huge theater companies were fighting over Nervous-Boy or Dan Trujillo's Talk of the Walkup, in that world I wouldn't get to be in them 'cause I'd be competing with cream-of-the-crop professionals.
What's up next for you, writing-wise?
I'm working on three plays, mainly because I have no attention span and have to keep switching them off when I get bored. One of them is called Viral, and it's sort of a strange look at pornography and fetishization. One is called Cowgirl Revenge, and it's a Western about unrequited love. One is called Snatchers, and it's a really messed-up take on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers novel, films, and rip-offs. I recently vaguely sketched an outline for a play about a divorce called Reptile.
Probably most of these will never be finished, but for some reason I need to be working on several so that I finish one.
The main thing is the next draft of Universal Robots, as we're gearing up to remount it in the next year.
Interview with Mac Rogers was conducted by Michael Criscuolo January 2008.