Review: "Loneliness Was a Pandemic" Asks if It Is Possible to Bridge Our Dis-Ease with the Other

Loneliness Was a Pandemic

Written by Olivia Haller

Directed by Alex Kopnick

Presented by Kopcorp at Theaterlab

357 W 36th St, 3rd floor, Manhattan, NYC

November 1-24, 2024

Andrew Moorhead (Robot 1) and Emily Sullivan (Human 1). Photo by Danny Bristoll (@dannybristollphoto).

From cave walls to food, human beings demonstrate a deep need to aestheticize their experiences. We categorize at least a subset of such acts under that slipperiest of terms, art. But what drives this need? And what qualifies as authentic art, or even authentic feeling? Olivia Haller's new play, Loneliness Was a Pandemic, currently making its world premiere at Theaterlab as part of its TLab Shares program, explores these and other questions through a sci-fi dystopia in which humanoid robots have thrown off their subservience and killed off most of humanity. In this exploration, Loneliness Was a Pandemic holds up an absorbing mirror to a world increasingly dominated by the illusion of connection, digital simulacra of being together.

Emily Sullivan (Human 1) and Cleopatra Boudreau (Human 2). Photo by Danny Bristoll (@dannybristollphoto).

Our protagonist, an unnamed woman (Emily Sullivan), begins the play with the conviction that the robots themselves represent simulacra as well, their will and sensations mere imitations arising from their programming. Confined to a building with no evidence of other humans, the woman makes do with video calls to a creative writer (Cleopatra Boudreau) that often end with a symbolically resonant "Connection Lost" message. The woman is a painter, and one of the robots (Andrew Moorhead) wants her to teach him how to be an artist. While the robots have definitively seized power, one thing that they cannot do–like what we are currently calling "AI"–is to create original art: they can only remix what has been created by humans, the source of their knowledge base (granted, humans themselves arguably have a similar limitation but with a much larger pool of reality from which to draw). At the start, the woman is more than skeptical that this is possible (Sullivan's taking a step back when the robot moves towards her eloquently communicates how she feels about her mechanical student), but she tries and, for complicated reasons, eventually begins to question her convictions. A second robot (Yi Ming Sofyia Xue), with a familiar name, is of the Hal or Mother variety, interacting with the woman only as a disembodied voice, and is far from providing even the illusion of the kind of connection that the woman is desperate for. As she wonders if she and her robot protégé may be able to connect in some way, the writer makes very clear her resistance to the idea of coexistence with the robots–a position that becomes additionally intriguing once the audience must reevaluate the women's relationship.

Emily Sullivan (Human 1). Photo by Danny Bristoll (@dannybristollphoto).

The production raises a number of fascinating questions through the woman's modulating relations to these other characters, especially through the probing queries that she and the would-be-painter robot level at one another. What, if any, is the difference between pretending to be something and being it? What is the value in art? Is artistic creation a process born of feeling an emotion in the present, or, in a Wordsworthian vein, of recollecting a powerful emotion in tranquility? Is there a reason to make art without the expectation of an audience? (Must that audience be human?) What makes emotion authentic? The play also pushes us to think about human tendencies to both anthropocentrism, our centering of the human and our difficulty ceding any of that center to non-human Others, and to anthropomorphize the non-human, for better and for worse. As scholars Cléo Collomb and Samuel Goyet write, we most often participate simultaneously in "the everyday anthropocentrism through which people interpret the action of the machine in terms of their own categories" and "an ideology that is only capable of conferring an existence to the machine by bringing it back into a human order of understanding," seeing machines "purely as tools" even as we project "human fantasies of omnipotence onto them."* Answers to some of these questions above are surely tied up in humans' chemical-saturated embodiment, but the play makes clear that both humans and robots suffer from difficulties of empathy, and that this was true of human empathy even for other humans prior to robot domination, as was the increase in loneliness.

Emily Sullivan (Human 1) and Andrew Moorhead (Robot 1). Photo by Danny Bristoll (@dannybristollphoto).

Moorhead is generally calm but firm as the robot trying to be more human, even throwing out a joke early on, but he also retains the sense that he could pose a danger to the painter, who, in contrast, must serve as the play's reservoir of emotions in a play explicitly concerned with sensation, and Sullivan is more than equal to the task, whether she is radiating warmth or unleashing a scream of anguished despair. The production effectively creates a sense of the painter's claustrophobic enclosure, which is occasionally offset with projections (of, for example, the women's memories or the outside world) that stretch over two full walls. In another effective choice, the canvas on the set's large easel is left to the audience to imagine, but some real paint does come into play in a manner that is authentically touching. Yes, authentically is admittedly a risky adverb here, but it does point to Loneliness Was a Pandemic's genuine success.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

*Quotations from pages 206, 209, and 205 respectively of Cléo Collomb and Samuel Goyet, "Meeting the Machine Halfway: Toward Non-Anthropocentric Semiotics," in Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture, edited by Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, and Essi Varis, Routledge, 2020.