Down the Rocky Road and All the Way to Bedlam

Or: The Android’s Child

Be warned, this play is very good and veeeerrry depressing. Not just inspiring melancholy but rip out a heart with a robotic arm, crush it and watch the pulp ooze between the metal fingers to squelch upon the floor depressing. But still great! So if you’re looking for really smart science fiction or an electric family drama, please go and find it.

Somewhere in the distant days to come, Tom (Joseff Stevenson) a programmer toils away in dreams. His seventeen-year-old daughter Lucy (Alexis Ries) is dying (Of Consumption! It’s back in fashion!) and while he works to bend the natural order to his electronic talents, leaves her in the care of her “sister” Zelazny (Chase Nuerge), an android created by Thomas and his ex-wife Lain (Elizabeth C. MacDougald). After a separating from her family, Lain has returned at Zelazny’s urging, hoping to find validation for the feelings of longing that plague her, but secrets are beginning to tick into view and violence coils, waiting to spring.

Playwright D. Matthew Beyer has a created a superb story, both a searing story of what a parent will do for their child and top notch, classic Syfy grander of robotics (with significant images to Asimov and Zelazny’s namesake), on which I daren’t give away too much. It is hobbled slightly by Beyer’s affection for simultaneous speech, which, thanks to the mumble school of most of the cast, renders a lot of the fine sentiments to get lost, and perhaps the show takes a few further steps than it strictly needs to. But it’s dialog, especially the beautiful, Lear-like moments of misery and love (especially those written for Tom which are unfairly tear-inducing).

A particularly fine performance (and with clear-as-a-bell diction besides) is MacDougald’s Lain. Heartfelt and committed she not only gives a sterling performance of agonizing over the love for the two children, one flesh and one steel, that she left behind but also puts down pat Beyer’s deeply relevant talk on depression and mental illness. With a voice resigned to a lifetime of pain and doubt, Lain confesses, “I never wanted to kill myself, but I thought that I should,” truer words from the far side than I have heard in a long time. MacDougald never stretches herself, even in the face of terror or grief unbelievable remains beautifully still, allowing her thoughts a tight reign, even as they make brindle and cry.

This is a hard to watch show, both in terms of lighting and content, but it’s undeniably beautiful to watch Nuerge as they connect with their mother so long gone, or Stevenson to soothe his daughter’s head and offer to read to her and “Let Daddy take you to a faraway world,” from where bodies break and loved ones betray. It is a deeply moving, stick in the heart kind of play, but is not without, as all good tragedies ought to have, the tiniest pulse of hope.