Firebird Project Launches Adult Wing With ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS

Firebird Youth Theater, the nucleus of The Firebird Project, made its debut in the Spring of 2013 as the first independent youth-led theater company in its founders' community.

Since then, Firebird established itself as a storytelling organization and has given flight to nine off-Broadway productions, including digital programming during the pandemic, as well as its arts education wing, which provides opportunities for young artists to grow and learn through youth programs for acting, improv, playwriting, filmmaking, and creative writing.

This month, Firebird begins to write an exciting new chapter with the launch of the Firebird Players, the company's professional indie production wing. The Firebird Players' inaugural piece will be an original adaptation of Karel Capek's ROSSUM'S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS, adapted by Firebird founder and artistic director Leo Lion. The new Players company will build a bridge between the organization's signature youth education programs and its participants' lifelong careers in the arts, while continuing to foster community and expand Firebird's stake in the New York theatre scene as a whole.

This new production of R.U.R. is a rebirth of Karel Capek's forgotten classic, with a new modern-language translation that sets the story in an alternate-history 21st-century. In this one, the Universal Robot is introduced to society in the same historical moment as the smartphone. We reimagine Rossum's Universal Robots as another Silicon Valley titan, supplying robots by the millions to every private home, company, and national army in the world.

Capek's futuristic thriller explores the ethics and decision-making behind robotics and artificial intelligence and screams out with relevance in the wake of today's AI tech revolution, asking why humanity insists upon creating technology in its own image. R.U.R. tells the story of humanity's last day, with just seven actors and a hundred minutes.

This thrilling and prophetic 1920 play introduced the word "robot" to the world and provided the blueprint behind every high-tech science fiction from Ex Machina to Children of Men. Don't miss it!

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