Robot original makes a comeback
R.U.R.
New Jersey.Com
Jim Beckerman
Arpil 29, 2005
Robots are everywhere these days: from the cartoon cutups of the movie "Robots" to the droids in the upcoming "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" to the little automatic gizmo that vacuums your rug.
About the only place you don't see robots is the theater - where they originated.
"R.U.R.," the 1920 play in which Czech writer Karel Capek coined the word "robot," is seldom staged nowadays, despite being one of the most popular plays of the early 20th century.
And that's a pity, says Scott Alan Evans, co-artistic director of the Actor's Company Theatre, who is directing a small-scale production this weekend at New York's Florence Gould Hall.
"It's a great play," Evans says. "The issues it brings up are not hackneyed, not timeworn. But so many people took the idea of robots, and it became the subject of so many B movies, that people don't associate a robot play with deep ideas."
Capek probably didn't know what pop culture forces he was unleashing when he distilled the word "robot" from the Czech word "robota" - meaning "forced labor."
But his satirical tale of a robot factory on a remote island (the title "R.U.R." stands for "Rossum's Universal Robots"), cranking out artificial men for cheap labor, raised a lot of issues that bedevil our time as well as Capek's: the exploitation of workers, the dangers of technology run amok and the question of what precisely it means to be human.
"The question comes up, do they have souls?" Evans says. "Like many great science-fiction works, it really looks at some big ideas about the nature of life and man's role on the planet."
Capek's robots, by the way, are more organic than mechanical - more what would now be called a cyborg than the erector-set men popularized in films like "Forbidden Planet" and "Star Wars." But as in countless Hollywood movies that came after, the robots of "R.U.R." eventually revolt against their human "masters."
"There is humor in it, and melodramatic elements, but it's really a philosophical play," Evans says.
The 12-year old Actor's Company Theatre specializes in once-famous plays ("The Chalk Garden," "Look Homeward, Angel," "Separate Tables") that have for various reasons fallen out of favor. "R.U.R." is a perfect example; it last appeared on Broadway in 1942. Possibly, Evans says, the novelty of the robot concept had worn off by then.
"The play may have become a victim of its own publicity," he says.