If you’ve ever conversed with ChatGPT, you know how human this program can sound. But should we allow AI to paint our paintings and write our love poems? This is the question posed with “Flawless” by John Wooten, which opens at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville on October 9 and runs through October 25.
In the play, a theater professor (Michael Frederic) is approached by Tess (Ellen Adair), a former student who remembers the teacher’s file of outlines for plays he intends to write. One of them, in particular, looked like it could be a hit. Tess’s goal: to feed the outline to an AI program, and command it to write the play.
Frank, the professor, is a Luddite, who still writes everything on a typewriter. When he recognizes Tess’s intentions, he’s appalled.
Into the play walks Percy (Alexander Rios), the AI program designed by Tess. Percy is played by an actor, who does not, at first glance, appear to be a robot—but it’s unclear how fully human he is.
Most of us have spoken many times to AI, but have never seen its face. That’s the beauty of theater. With a little bit of makeup and good lighting, the impossible becomes visible.
When I ask Wooten if he was tempted to ask AI to write the character of Percy, he seemed offended. He said humans should write literary works—even ones about computer-generated minds. As artistic director of Premiere Stages in Union, New Jersey, Wooten had used AI for grant writing and notetaking, so he was familiar with its style of composition. Nonetheless, artificial intelligence is a moving target. “‘Flawless’ had its first production at Penguin Rep last fall, and initially we thought, ‘We’ll just take the same script and do it again,’ but AI has evolved so much in the last 11 months that I did a fairly significant rewrite,” Wooten says.
The idea for “Flawless” came from a gathering the playwright attended. “I was at a meeting of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, a meeting of all these theaters, and one of the people said, ‘You know, as an experiment, I asked AI to write a sequel to [Arthur Miller’s] ‘All My Sons,’ and write a sequel to [August Wilson’s] ‘Fences’—and within a minute AI spat out two scripts,” he recalls. “And that just horrified me, that AI could do something in a minute that we put our heart and soul into, as writers, to create these characters, and they’re part of us.”
Wooten began as an actor, but when one of his plays—“Trophies”—was produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1993, he decided to concentrate on playwriting. “Flawless” is what’s known as a “problem play”: a work of theater addressing a social issue. It asks: should we fight AI? Is it like protesting the motorcar in 1913? Or is non-human intelligence far more sinister? And what does it mean to be a Homo sapiens? As we spend 10 hours a day staring at our screens, how human is any of us anymore?
Wooten knows where he stands. “I still think theater, just given the experience of people coming together and sitting in a live space and breathing in the air together, as audience members—I would just love to see AI not involved with theater for as long as possible,” he declared. “Playwrights have written plays for thousands of years, and I think that should continue for thousands more years.”
Premiere Stages, where Wooten is artistic director, has a yearly play festival, for which it accepts unsolicited manuscripts—but the theater has banned plays written by AI.
