In Elmer Rice’s 1923 play “The Adding Machine,” an office drone is plunged into existential crisis when his accounting job is replaced by mechanical technology. A hundred years later, artificial intelligence promises (or threatens) to do much more: write all our emails, create all our spreadsheets. And maybe, perform in all our plays?
How might that work? Consider The Feast’s staging of Rice’s play, a production dubbed “The Adding Machine: A Cyborg Morality Play,” opening Sept. 14 (previews begin Sept. 12) at The Lee Center for the Arts on Seattle University’s campus. ...
The production will involve generative AI in its scenic and costume design and will employ chatbot tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, to create characters that interact with the play’s five human actors. Throughout the play, actors will prompt the AI tools onstage and receive responses via text or voice in real time. While the play’s structure and around 80% of its text will remain fixed from show to show, the rest will require the cast to improvise in these interactions. ...
See the full story here: https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/theater/this-seattle-theater-company-plans-to-use-ai-in-its-play/