Theater review by Melissa Rose Bernardo
In the spirit of Annie Dorsen’s provocative Prometheus Firebringer at Theatre for a New Audience, I asked ChatBox to write a review of the show. In mere seconds, it produced 250 words, including high praise: “A mesmerizing fusion of ancient myth and cutting-edge technology…A captivating blend of live performance and digital wizardry…An immersive experience that challenges our perception of what theater can be.” Impressive! You might even think a real person wrote it, were it not for the comment about “live actors”: Writer-director-performer Dorsen is the only human being on stage.
Her costars, so to speak, are powered by artificial intelligence: theater masks, with hollowed-out eyes and haunted expressions, who churn out lines “written” by GPT–3.5 in AI-generated voices. Their topic is Prometheus, who defied Zeus and stole fire—i.e., knowledge, progress, technology—from Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity; as punishment, Zeus bound him to a rock. Aeschylus penned a whole trilogy on this subject: Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Prometheus Firebringer. Dorsen is experimenting with that final and essentially unknown play, in which Prometheus and Zeus have something of a reconciliation. (Only a fragment of the original text remains.)
Before the performance begins, a précis of the play—typed out in real time, letter by letter—appears on a big screen. This is followed by a slightly different summary, and then yet another, as though someone were shaking a jar of words and phrases and dumping them out. When you see “With great power comes great responsibility,” you begin to suspect that these descriptions may be the work of a chatbot; when you see “The play ends tragically as tragedy strikes,” you know it is. Where do they get this stuff? “OpenAI doesn’t reveal what precise data was used for training ChatGPT, but the company says it generally crawled the web, used archived books and Wikipedia,” Dorsen tells us. This is a verbatim quote from a 2022 story on CNBC; unlike ChatGPT and its cohorts, Dorsen provides sources for everything she says—and we do mean everything. (“The masks. Their voices. What they say”: Those three short phrases are identified as the titles of, respectively, an episode of The Twilight Zone, a family-history podcast and a “BookGame” for players on the go.)
Dorsen’s fascinating commentary samples from a wide variety of sources: works by Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf; articles from The New Yorker and the The New York Times; posts on Twitter, Reddit and Mastodon; Simon Critchley’s book Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us; even The Teen Acting Ensemble: A Practical Guide to Doing Theater with Teenagers. (“Contrary to popular decree, there is such a thing as a ‘bad choice.’”) “I’m just borrowing this stuff, just like when you borrow a book from the library,” Dorsen says, citing Princess Incognito: Nightmare at the Museum, a children’s book by Singapore’s N.J. Humphreys. “Going to the library isn’t a crime, is it?”
Though AI has been trending hard this year, Prometheus Firebringer is the latest in a long line of Dorsen works on this subject. She has been experimenting with chatbots since long before they became ubiquitous: In 2010’s Hello There, she put two computers on stage “talking” about a debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky; in 2013’s A Piece of Work, she used algorithms to create a version of Hamlet. She recognizes not only the potential of this technology but also the threat that it poses to all kinds of artists. But while Dorsen may use AI, you know she’ll never abuse it. Behind the philosophical inquiries she puts onstage, there is real intelligence at play.
Prometheus Firebringer. Theatre for a New Audience (Off Broadway). Written, directed, and performed by Annie Dorsen. Running time: 45 mins. No intermission.
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