Hey, Alexa, Are You a Golem?
On the eve of destruction & after the apocalypse: Lisa Clair's "Willa's Authentic Self" & ruth tang's "Work Hard Have Fun Make History"
“What is a Golem story?” I type into Google, in all my embarrassing Jewish ignorance.
I had just seen Willa’s Authentic Self at MITU580, a surreal new work by Lisa Clair billed as a “musical, monstrous and maximalist re-imagining of the ancient Jewish Golem myth.”
Google enlightens me. In Jewish folklore, a Golem is an anthropomorphic being grown out of clay and typically brought to life through magical incantation. In terms of its message, the Golem story is a highly mutable one. The creature could be a protector of the Jewish people, can represent the beauty of creation, or might — as in Willa — serve as a reminder that not all creations, however fantastic, are ultimately good.
In Clair’s madcap play, Willa (played by Clair) is fed up. Fed up with her dead-end civil service job, her useless lover Walter, and the hopeless state of the world. Then she receives a strange present: a lump of clay. Soon the lump grows into a full sized Golem (Juliana Francis Kelly, whose costume unfortunately gives Oompa Loompa vibes), who provides Willa with the gift of extraordinary power. Overnight, Willa becomes the Mayor and begins to remake New York City anew, sweeping away homelessness, inequality and intolerance. But soon the Golem turns on Willa and begins to wreak destruction.
Destruction — of the worldwide variety — is also a theme of Work Hard Have Fun Make History, a new work by ruth tang kicking off Clubbed Thumb’s invaluable Summerworks series. tang’s scattershot play follows an unspecified apocalyptic event, and jumps between a variety of scenes depicting work, play and human connection filtered almost entirely through AI interfaces. Sex, grief, love — they’re all conducted solo, with just a disembodied voice as company. (A cast of three, b, Sagan Chen and Susannah Perkins, play multiple characters and devices.) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are the only named characters, and tang’s play is, at least as I took it, an imagining of the pair’s respective world visions taken to their most logical extremes: limitless automation, and not an ounce of humanity.
Clair and tang excel in capturing how a world of ever-expanding possibilities can, despite these supposed advances, seem to narrow and flatten. Willa saves New York only to watch it collapse in on itself again and realizes that her magical answer — her Golem – had closed off all her connections to others. The denizens of tang’s play have technology that caters to every need but are each isolated and alone, stuck speaking to machines that will never quite learn to be human.
In both plays, connection is the key. Willa actually creates an idyllic New York City with the help of her Golem, a paradise not just for humans but all living beings. That Eden is movingly described by a Queen Ant, who visits Willa after the fall: “Healthy snacks were provided on the now gleaming subways painted in houndstooth, leopard print and sparkling hues of pink; its buskers were held in the same regard as Carnegie Hall alumni.”
But Willa never connected with her people, nor with the ants, many of whom she murdered. (The notion of humans and animals living in harmony is a late and awkward insertion in Clair’s script, but Caitlin Ayer’s ant costumes are incredible.) Jeff and Elon exist at a similar disconnect from the world, hoping as they keep on devising business plans that, “an eleventh-hour thing will show up and stop the screaming.”
Both plays could benefit from a clearer focus on this theme of connection. The Golem narrative of Willa is engaging, but Clair’s text meanders in a few too many other directions, including several dream sequences involving James Dean. The intent of these dreams is, I think, to highlight Willa’s detachment from her own world even as she attempts to save it, but the end result feels unfocused.
Meanwhile, tang staunchly refuses to weave together Work Hard’s disparate story threads. They seem to be connected, with certain characters unknowingly intersecting with others over the vast divides of technology. But I would have to sit down and draw out some maps to clarify their links. The play’s refusal to provide any sort of relief from disconnection is impressive, but just a little catharsis might be nice.
All the same, the audience does connect with these two insistently oddball works thanks to the performers lending them humanity. Clair is wonderfully harried and then painfully tragic as Willa, bringing unexpected pathos to a heartfelt final monologue. And the company of Work Hard breaks our hearts most of all in its precise depictions of blank, inhuman machines feigning the qualities of genuine life. A world of fantastic, terrible creations.