Review: ANTHROPOLOGY at Rogue Machine At The Matrix Theatre

A chatbot could never - will never - anything this cool.

Sorry, call me a luddite, a naif who is spitting into the wind that the future is typhooning. Sure, the bots are coming for my job as they are for those of every other person who spins words for a living, but to repeat. No form of artificial intelligence will be able to recreate the experience of sitting through Lauren Gunderson’s ANTHROPOLOGY, and specifically what Rogue Machine Theatre’s John Perrin Flynn has accomplished with it for the play’s North American premiere at the Matrix Theatre.

Not that someone won’t try. When you consider how crazy different Gunderson’s body of work has been, the very idea of feeding her works into an algorithm and telling the bot to do its worst carries some intrigue.  After all, THE BOOK OF WILL is nothing like the Miss Bennett trilogy which is nothing like I AND YOU (about to become a musical). Not only is Gunderson already one of the most produced playwrights in America, the lady doesn’t seem to repeat herself.

In her program intro, Gunderson noted that she considered writing this, her latest play under a pseudonym to curb people’s expectations… or maybe to trick them? Regardless. With ANTHROPOLOGY, Gunderson has written a work that is part sci-fi thriller, part love story, part mystery, part deep dive into the concept of family that works on every possible level. During the detective portions, I was reminded of the 2018 Aneesh Chaganty film SEARCHING…until Hal enters the picture.

(That’s already probably saying too much. If you see this production, do not let anyone ruin it for you.)

A year after the disappearance of her kid sister, a young Silicon Valley tech genius named Merril (played by Alexandra Hellquist) has fed every piece of information she can get her hands on into an algorithm to bring her back. The “new” Angie (Kaylee Kaneshiro), built as she is from the original’s informational makeup, mimics the real Angie in speech, mannerisms, personality and history. When things get in any way uncomfortable, Merril can adjust the algorithm  to make Angie feel happier, safer, more aware that she is loved. Either way, in voice and on screen, the recreated Angie is disturbingly realistic.

Designed, as she is in part, to bring Merril comfort, Angie reconnects Merril with her ex, Raquel (Julia Manis) and also with the sisters’ estranged mother, Brin (Nan McNamara), The relationship between Merril and Brin was already pretty dicey before Angie went missing. The young woman’s disappearance basically broke her in half. Now wearing plain functional clothes and with a messy haircut, Merril prowls around the techno-cave she calls home surrounded by whirring computers and giant monitors and getting a little bit better with the continued interaction between her and this newer more agreeable Angie, an Angie who also suggests she might even be able to solve the mystery and track down the actual missing human being. Which, not surprisingly, sends the already fixated Merril on a dangerous and potentially heartbreaking search.

At various points in the play, different people meet “Angie” and remark on how deeply messed up what Merril has done…and yet they can’t look away, can’t power it down or disengage. That’s how close to the real thing this algorithm seems to be. Merril may not initially get that she’s a smartphone raiding, chatbot-programming Victor Frankenstein, but she will. And as the play’s shock of an ending reaffirms, any kind of promethean meddling no matter how ell-intentioned comes with a price.

At a tense 90 minutes, ANTHROPOLOGY doesn’t provide these characters a lot of room to establish who they are outside the context of the Anie search, but Flynn’s actors are up to the task. Hellquist and Manis generate some painful longing for each other as the two lovers rediscover their common ground. One can easily understand how a reclusive techie like Merril would fall for a lemon curd-making nurturer like Raquel and vice versa. Watching Hellquist perched awkwardly on her own furniture, awkwardly pouring out her heart to try to prevent Raquel from leaving is witnessing a very human scene. The arrival of Brin ups the stakes even further as McNamara’s flawed mom tries to build a bridge back to her family.

And then there’s the marvelous Kaneshiro who – with the adjustment a few key strokes - is essentially playing different versions of the same character. In the actor’s hands, whether vocally or as an image on screen, Angie is by turns angry, caustic, reproving, witty, funny  and very smart. Apologies to Tilly Norwood and all their creepy ilk, but human beings and human beings alone are capable of this kind of work.

Anthropology, the field, is the science of what it means to be human. ANTHROPLOGY the play breaks that concept into a million fragments and delights in the impossible practice of putting them back together.

ANTHROPOLOGY plays through November 9 at 7657 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles.