Deep Blue

A New Play by Gregg Irwin

Or: Shake Down Blues

How does one play an artificial intelligence on stage? What is required to bring a non-human intelligence into the bond between story and audience? Turns out not much. Only a colored light, an actor back stage on a microphone and a strong, humorous, surprisingly moving script.

Gregg Irwins deep blue introduces us to Chris (Matt Melton) a professional simulator pilot. Trying desperately to out run family tragedy and his own grief he agrees to a two year stint on a submarine server farm, helping to run the wired-up world from the ocean floor (these are real things, a basis of science fact from which the science fiction can be built). His only company, and the systems he will be field testing are four AI’s (or Cyber Assistants to use Corporate Terms) designed to keep the “Habidat,” the servers, and Chris himself up and running. System Supervisor Howard (Justin Tharpe), Crew Caretaker Della (Carlyn Jones), I.T. maven Tran (Keliann Priest) and the boisterous mechanical operator Boxer (Alexander Kirk) must interface with Chris, learning to function as a team through singing of sea shanties, overcoming undersea of perils, and the facing of shadowy true intents of the corporation that put them there.

Director, set, and sound designer Paul Archibeque has, in the simple black box, created the sprawling world of the habidat and the pressure of the sea outside. Melton, the only human onstage for 95% of the show, walks through its corridors and takes us through its endless operations, while still managing to crack jokes with his coworkers and crack, movingly to pieces under his grief. For the unseen CA’s their actors make themselves presences and unfold their personalities, from Chris’s subordinates to his unlikely found family by only their voice. Each manages to do this with their own particular flare, though special mention goes to Jones who’s Della (a CA with a specific burr between herself and Chris) starts as the most robotic and transforms to the most human.

Irwin’s script navigates stories of grief and memory, identities found and lost, insignificance and heroism, all integrated into a grounded story of science and survival. There is no handwaving of the intricacies of life beneath the waves, or the lives and deaths and afterlives of AI systems. Yet, through the science we get jokes expertly cracked (epically from Boxer, imbued by Kirk with a big hearted, slavic warmth) and moments of love bloom bloom like undersea flowers, unexpected but bright and marvelous. Like the sea shanties the crew bond over, the play is pulled together from many different voices, many different parts to make a rousing, moving harmony.