Review: FLAWLESS Plays Around with AI, at Penguin Rep Theatre thru Oct. 19

You can’t open your eyes these days without constantly running into two little letters: A and I.

When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) as a topic in storytelling and as a creative tool to help tell those stories, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

In Flawless, playwright John J. Wooten has delivered one of the early efforts harnessing AI, and he deftly addresses, in a tightly-woven play, AI in both contexts — as a character in a story and as a catalyst for creative engineering used to tell the story. Flawless is having its world premiere at Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point, N.Y. (Rockland County), through Oct. 19.  

Mr. Wooten’s simple and propulsive setup that launches the tale has once-successful-now-down-on-his-luck stage and TV writer Frank (Michael Frederic) shacked up in a remote cabin in woodsy Mendocino, California, trying desperately to rediscover the muse that has abandoned him, if not rebelled against him.

Frank’s barely scraping by as an instructor teaching an entry-level theater course to three students in a community center, the result of having lost his professorship status teaching playwriting after being accused of inappropriate behavior with a student.

That now-former student, Tess (Ellen Adair), is who Frank is shacking up with, their fortunes having dramatically diverged. Tess’s playwriting trajectory is meteoric while Frank’s career has cratered. Her play Misimagine is filling seats on Broadway, with a London opening ahead, film rights sold and a Tony nomination. On the heels of all that, her producer has commissioned and paid an advance to Tess to deliver two more scripts – due in New York by the next day. Tess’s dilemma is that she has nothing producible ready to deliver in one day. Tess’s solution is that she knows Frank has promising scripts that could be whipped into crowd-pleasing material overnight. But how?

Aha! Enter the play’s third character, an AI named Percy, who takes human(oid) form in an exquisitely rendered performance by Alexander Rios. As limited as is his time on stage, he leaves an indelible impression through carefully articulated physicality that captures the essence of a bot without caricaturing it. When Mr. Rios flashes a wickedly winsome smile, it’s an exclamation point on Percy’s smooth, wholesome handsomeness. His soft, soothing vocal inflection recalls iconic computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It soon becomes evident that Percy the AI portal is Tess’s muse, and, in no small sense, a virtual partner in her newfound theatrical success.

To be clear, Percy doesn’t write plays out of whole cloth. Tess provides characters, plot and other essential elements that comprise a toolbox from which Percy can build a complete edifice of artifice, with an unsuspecting audience never knowing the truth of how the entertainment was fabricated.

Also to be clear, Tess’s most successful authorship is not Misimagine; rather, it is her authorship of the playwriting platform she has christened Percy.
 

Tess tells Frank that Percy can put the glossy finishing touches on at least two of Frank’s projects without breaking a sweat.  In so doing, Percy would fulfill his pre-programmed function, Tess would have the two scripts she’s already been paid to deliver within 24 hours, and floundering Frank would be flush with cash because Tess is handing over her advance to him. It’s a win-win-win.

Except, as a dramatist from the old school, Frank isn’t buying in to Tess’s scheme so quickly. He wants nothing to do with Percy or any AI. He has his scruples, even if he doesn’t have his shekels.

As Tess and Frank, Ms. Adair and Mr. Frederic are worthy adversaries for each other. They skillfully bring to the stage the requisite range of emotions engaged when lovers go a-quarreling, then make up, then rinse, repeat. We all know how that goes and they keep it going with the right rhythm of dramatic impact.  

Director Joe Brancato shapes the action with a crafty sense of human nature, noting how people in a relationship – whether professional or personal – can get caught up in a dancing duel of thrust and parry. At the same time, he is masterly at keeping his productions light on their feet, rooted in a canny instinct for audience appeal.

It would appear that part of the irony of Flawless is that Tess herself conveys the kind of calculation and subcutaneous coldness that her performative lovey-dovey overtures can’t fully obscure, a deviousness that the charming Ms. Adair makes cleverly palatable.

Where Frank is unambiguously altruistic about his craft and his integrity, Tess is unapologetically ambitious and self-servingly ambiguous at first about her intentions, as Frank finds out to his chagrin. Dealing with her is like playing three-card monte.  Mr. Frederic invests Frank with an inner life of frustration and dignity whose soulfulness is highly affecting.

Mr. Wooten displays a deft writer’s hand in broaching matters of ethics without lecturing us. AIs go to school in part by appropriating other people’s intellectual property through so-called Large Language Models (LLM). But here it’s the human, Tess, who has designs on appropriating her mentor Frank’s creative output. Yet, it’s not exactly plagiarism if the rights holder – that is, the writer – is willingly handing over their creations, is it? Mr. Wooten doesn’t claim to have any easy answers, which gives Flawless a provocative bite.

He also seems to be saying that while we fret over Ais at some point behaving a bit too human for our comfort, it’s worth remembering that humans, like Tess, have been known to  emulate the soul of a machine by not letting something as precious as empathy get in the way of their Machiavellian machinations. 

Ingrained in the writing process is the psychological pain a writer endures (which helps explain why some of our greatest wordsmiths were also addicts). An AI like Percy circumvents the human toll of being a writer. It turns the passion of pain into a process, devoid of emotion or the liberating discovery that obtains from trial-and-error. When Tess tells Frank that Percy is “flawless,” Frank’s response is that it doesn’t mean Percy is better than a flesh-and-blood playwright. (Any writer could easily drink an AI under the table.)

The Flawless set design by Christian Fleming is anchored on the back wall by an expansive panoramic image of a lush green forest that spans the full width of the stage. It immediately establishes a sense of place that puts Frank’s cabin at a far remove from mainstream society and from the mind-numbing thrum of technology. Frank has spirited himself away to the oxygenated organism of nature after having been choked off from the built world.

At one point Frank tells Tess that not all plays need resolutions. Whether or not Mr. Wooten ends Flawless with a pat resolution is for each audience member to determine. Did he employ his own Percy to help him conjure how it ends? Or is he simply a hard-working and clever playwright adept at exploiting his own devices.

Or… in our evolutionary rebirth as co-habitants with this AI life force, are both of the above possibilities the best of all possible worlds?

Production Credits
The production is designed by Christian Fleming (set and Costume Designer), Martin Vreeland (lighting designer), Max Silverman (sound designer), Yana Biryukova (projection designer), and Buffy Cardoza (properties designer). Michael Palmer is the production stage manager and Leighton Samuels is the movement coordinator.