When machines do everything for us, what will we do with ourselves?

Inspired by the
modern classic R.U.R.
by Karel Capek

And as our technology evolves, what might it become?  Gizmos, alternate beings neither human nor machine, born to serve. In the upcoming Penn State Centre Stage production of Gizmo, the new play by award-winning playwright Anthony Clarvoe, your gizmo could be “your loved one. Returned to you. Permanent. Immortal life.” So says, Faber, the soulful, young artist played by Lance Beilstein. Meanwhile, a driven engineer (Carrie McNulty) designs ever-more-powerful beings (“This is a tool. My tool. I made it… The hammer did not drive the nail.”), and a visionary scientist (Kira Lace Hawkins) works to hack the system that shackles their intelligence (“They can do so much, just processing data. Think what they could do with knowledge.”).  All the while, gizmos continue to develop beyond what anyone believed possible, and they want only one thing: to serve “users”, their human masters. But as Shakespeare cautioned: “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.” Or, put another way: “Be careful what you wish for."

More about Gizmo. . .

Gizmo is a play that takes place in the future. How far in the future depends on whom you believe... 100 years? There are still bars, and homes, and public spaces, but our technology has developed so far that we've gone from smart phones to smart people, or machines if you will, that we've created to store all of our information, handle our tasks, process our data. But what happens when we continue to add more variables, more apps, more human functionality? Gizmos are flesh mechanisms, manufactured to serve. We see three generations of increasing fluency and superficial semblance to humanity. They do not aspire to be real live people. They are not cute, or sentimental, or evil. They are other than that.  
As to the people: We've become a slaveholding society. Cavalier recklessness, pride and high honor, entitlement and the ever-present risk of terminal indolence. The antebellum South, feudal Japan, imperial Rome.

What it's like to work on a new play. . .

Anthony Clarvoe:
“Anytime you have a scene where the scene partners want vastly different things from each other really urgently there’s a lot of potential for drama.. and for comedy. I think one of the fun things about it has been to discover how much humor there is in these relationships where there’s this constant misunderstanding, this constant frustration, this constant miscommunication and this sort of helpless dependency. These are all ingredients for comedy.”
 

(Carrie McNulty and Erik Raymond Johnson rehearse a scene from GIZMO.)

Dan Carter:
“I think it’s been great to work with the actors and I think it’s been a good experience for them too because in addition to working on the characters, the individual characters they’ve been working on, they’re also understanding how a play comes together. I mean it’s easy to dissect an existing play and say what makes this play so great? What is it now? But to see how it comes together and then how it changes, and how what they bring to the table actually impacts the rewriting. It all just doesn’t come sprung full-blown from Anthony’s head, but some of it is in response to the revelations that we get through seeing them and hearing their words and their voices. In just this trip there were a number of pretty profound – simple, but profound changes, and I think that’s hopefully one of the differences in being someone who’s quote “just an actor” and someone who is a person of the theatre. An educated person of the theatre as well as an actor, to say “Ok well, hmm this used to be my favorite line and now it goes to somebody else but this is why it’s better, this is why these changes are made, and I just got to experience a play getting better.”.