Destination Undefined
Directed by Yibin Wang
Presented by Cellunova at Theatre 154
154 Christopher St. #1E, Manhattan, NYC
August 22-September 7, 2025
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| L to R: Tom Shane, Lyra Lys, Victor Gao, Jueun Kang, Chisom Awachie. Photo by Ziru Wang |
The stage has acted as a site to think about the personhood and treatment of artificial beings at least since Karel Čapek's 1920 play
R.U.R., in which he coined the word "robot," and such considerations have only gained in contemporary urgency as, for instance, corporate CEOs envision AI agents replacing not only human workers, including therapists and teachers, but also friends and romantic partners.
Destination Undefined, a world premiere sci-fi play from Cellunova, "
a multidisciplinary theater company led by first-generation immigrant and BIPOC artists, creating socially engaged work that fuses bold storytelling with new technologies," takes an engrossing, retrospective look at a not-too-distant future in which society will reach a critical juncture in the relationship between human and AI beings. As
Destination Undefined plunges us into this critical moment, it elegantly underscores the ways in which the question of who gets to decide who is recognized as having (full) personhood and by what criteria extends not only to "robots" but also to humans themselves.
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| L to R: Lyra Lys, Jueun Kang, Chisom Awachie. Photo by Ziru Wang |
Before the performance begins, audience members are invited to play a couple of pre-show games, a digital quiz that tells you what kind of AI personality you are and a chance to cast a physical vote regarding whether AIs should have voting rights. That question becomes important within the play's narrative, but first comes a far-future frame set in 2564, 500 years after humans have gone extinct. AI agents, though, continue to survive, and we meet a group, living in a metaverse, who are members of the Human Research Institute. Like humans, they have both different personalities and different ancestries–Lee (Tom Shane) is programmed in Fortran, for instance, while Jane (Jueun Kang) descends from ChatGPT 4, and amidst audience-directed metatheatrical jokes, we learn that they plan to investigate a memory cube found in a vault under Manhattan that contains a human consciousness from the year 2051. Most of the rest of the play unfolds within those memories, when the vault in question was used by the US government to store gold following a financial crisis and the return of the gold standard. Nonetheless, by 2051, most people no longer see gold as valuable, and cryptocurrency rules the day. Xavier (Tom Shane), a vault supervisor who hasn't been outside for ten years, remains committed to gold and centralized finance, (rightly) describing crypto as selling the hope of getting rich while sleeping, and against artificial beings. The other supervisor is Grace (Lyra Lys), who immigrated from Hong Kong and formerly worked as a casino dealer, and whose crisp boilersuit stands in contrast to Xavier's battered sports jacket and jeans just as her accepting attitudes towards robots contrast his, including the fact that she has had a "Rubicon Chip" installed, something Xavier would never do.
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| L to R: Victor Gao, Chisom Awachie. Photo by Ziru Wang |
Another chip-less character is Emily (Jueun Kang), who has not had one installed even though not having one has put her substantially behind her peers in a United States in which birthright citizenship has been eliminated and grades and employment are both criteria for being awarded citizen status (being a noncitizen, as is very clear right now, correlates, like being a robot, with dehumanization). Grace, with her now-deceased husband, raised Emily from the age of three, after Emily's biological parents returned to China, and now Emily is one of two new interns under Grace and Xavier at the gold vault. The second intern is Bob (Victor Gao), who is trying to keep hidden that he is a member of the same Human Research Institute as the AI agents in the play's frame and who communicates with Robert, to whom Bob is neurally connected. For Bob, Robert functions as an internal voice, while for the audience Robert is represented simultaneously by a very cool wheeled robot and by the expressive performance of
Chisom Awachie, who plays Robert while operating his robot form onstage, somewhat like you would see with a traditional puppet. As Emily discovers and tries to find a way to open a mysterious compartment that Grace wants her to stop asking about, the nation's vote on whether robots should have voting rights ignites a crisis that traps the characters in the vault, a situation that will test not only their ingenuity but also, and more importantly, their definitions, relationships, and beliefs.
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| Jueun Kang. Photo by Ziru Wang |
Destination Undefined imagines a future in which even artificial beings will face unemployment and unhousedness (decommissioned units are referred to derisively as "robo hobos") and humans threaten to undo themselves both in the pursuit of capitalist accumulation at all costs (Bob asks why the United States kept "racing to automate themselves into oblivion" just because other nations were doing it) and as a result of their tendency to oppress labor, whether artificial or human beings. The production allows parallels to emerge organically between the AI and immigrant/non-citizen experiences, including as regards identity, belonging, and being "seen," while also complicating those parallels in interesting ways (Emily, for instance, doesn't know Cantonese, which gives her one fewer way to connect with her family, but Bob can download it in an instant). The lighting (designed by Sophia Zhu), sound (designed by
Sophie Yuqing Nie), and projections that sometimes suffuse the entire set (Qixin Zhang) are both aesthetically impressive and handily helpful in immersing us in the claustrophobic world of the vault, as well as in the world of those looking back on it. Gao is fabulous as Bob, blending sweetness, curiosity, and competence before, for reasons that we will not spoil, that all changes; and he and Awachie play off of one another with humor and dynamism. Shane maintains our sympathy for Xavier while lending the right amount of abrasiveness to his desire to hold onto the ways of the past, and Lys tinges strength with melancholy as Grace, whose struggles with the past are of a different kind. Meanwhile, Kang's vivid performance makes it clear why the principled, inquisitive outsider Emily would be drawn to Bob (and she pulls off a sensational breakdown as AI Jane early on). Helping us to think about our present as much as about our future,
Destination Undefined more than earns a place in the tradition of intelligent, entertaining science fiction driven equally by ideas and characters.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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