It’s so annoying, isn’t it? Aging parents, needing help, expecting you to just drop everything and take care of them when you’ve got so much going on. What’s an American daughter to do?
Enter Jenny, the problem-solving digital assistant, represented by a glowing orb, at the center of Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s Smart, ably directed by Jess Hayes at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through June 23. Jenny is an AI-powered, Siri-style helper that Elaine (Kea Trevett) orders from Amazon with the hope that it can help manage the care of her ailing mother, Ruth (Christine Farrell).
In the play’s opening scene, Ruth appears mobile and alert, but it soon becomes apparent that she’s suffering from the effects of a stroke. She has trouble finding words (“Where are my cleepers?”) and stashes her hated morning oatmeal under sofa cushions when her daughter’s not looking. Elaine, a real estate agent, is struggling as a caregiver, ashamed of her mother’s decline and of the condition of the house they share, which overflows with crocheted throws, piles of discarded shoes, and an endless assortment of glass and porcelain knick-knacks.
Scenic designer Ant Ma has created an intricately detailed set that is not merely cluttered but in total disarray, a stark reminder of the mother’s condition. We feel Elaine’s fatigue as she wearily surveys the living room, but we also empathize with Ruth, who is losing her memory but holding tight to the things she loves and can still recognize.
“Spying on me,” is how Ruth regards Jenny at first, an observation revealing that, while she has trouble forming complete sentences, Ruth hasn’t lost her mind. She wants little to do with the orb on the coffee table until Elaine, desperate to show her mother how the device might be of use, orders Jenny to play some Lady Gaga. As her mother howls in protest, Elaine challenges Ruth to ask Jenny to play music that is more to her taste (she’s partial to Antônio Carlos Jobim).
Unknown to Elaine, Jenny’s programmer, Gabby (Blair Baker), is listening in to the family’s interactions with the device to optimize its performance. We see her at a sparse modern workstation behind a transparent living room wall. As Gabby works to perfect Jenny’s responses, she develops a crush on Elaine.
When Elaine leaves her mother home alone to manage an open house, Gabby shows up and sparks fly between the two women. Elaine returns, and a romance with Gabby blooms, though Elaine remains unaware that her new girlfriend knows more about her than she’s letting on. When Elaine finally learns the truth about Gabby’s monitoring of the household, she asks, “Are you saying you’re like my phone — this vaguely creepy thing that’s just too useful to give up?”
While it might strain credulity to think that AI researchers are listening in to every household equipped with Alexa or Siri, the relationship between Elaine and Gabby is beautifully rendered by Trevett and Baker. It’s a counterweight to the fraught dynamics between Elaine and Ruth.
Both of these young women are strikingly lonely; insomniacs, they trade stories of playing Minecraft, eating jellybeans, and obsessing about Tupperware orders in the middle of the night. “My life’s not that interesting, just complicated,” Elaine tells Gabby. Their shared sense of alienation and drift is one of Smart’s ironies, given that Elaine purchased Jenny to ease her mother’s isolation, not her own. But while Ruth, played with tenderness and vulnerability by Farrell, comes to delight in Jenny’s quiz games and the ability to order her favorite hard candies with a voice command, the smart device proves to be just another object in her overstuffed living room. Like the porcelain cats and empty Amazon boxes, Jenny can’t spoon-feed Ruth her oatmeal or give her a hug.
Smart was developed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project. It is billed as a play that asks audiences to consider “how and why we let technology into our homes, and the unexpected changes tech can bring.” While it suggests one kind of AI risk, this is not fresh territory. The more vexing questions posed by the play have to do with why so many Americans struggle to put vulnerable family members first, whether they are elders or children.
Trevett does an admirable job showing us how trapped Elaine feels, but it’s painful to watch her infantilizing her mother one moment, neglecting her the next, and threatening to put her in a home or “have an army of aides coming in here.” Ruth gives as good as she gets, reminding her daughter that they share a home not only because of her own growing frailty but also because “you don’t have anything else.”
While Smart breaks no new ground in its handling of tech-related privacy concerns, Hamilton’s focus on challenges related to elder care invites us to weigh the distinction between AI used to boost customer engagement (or write theater reviews) and AI used as a stand-in for caregivers. Why is Elaine so eager to believe that technology can replace human kindness or touch? Is it simply that she’s self-absorbed, valuing her own independence over familial interdependence? Or shackled to work and unable to find a feasible, affordable solution?
For most Americans scrambling to find and pay for the care of vulnerable loved ones, the answer is probably both. As the AI revolution continues, its effects will matter less than our rationale for using it in the first place, revealing how smart or desperate we’ve become.
High Tech
The event: Smart, a play by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton
The time: Through June 23, Thursday to Saturday at 7 p.m.; Sunday at 3 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, 2357 Route 6
The cost: $42.50; seniors, $38.50; students, $17.50 at what.org
