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probably-a-muppet · 4 months ago

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Robots, Dolls, and Stars

Teaching a Robot to Love is a 2022 speculative queer musical by Laser Webber about how being nonbinary is kinda like being a robot. That’s a gross over simplification. Marsh (knock-off Alexa) is an AI built by Advernado (knock-off Amazon) to predict costumers’ needs so that it can recommend them products to by. But when one of it’s lesbian creators does a bit too good of a job, Marsh gains sentience and determines that the only real way to meet people’s needs is to tear down the capitalist society. Advernado throws out Marsh and it’s creator. The rest of the story is largely about Marsh exploring its own identity and exploring a human body given to it by the aforementioned lesbian.

It’s a very treacle story, but it adequately explores the struggle of finding identity under a capitalist system that wants to reduce you and your friends to either products or consumers or both, and how friendship, community, and giving people room to grow will lead us to a better future. It’s a nice message and the show definitely encapsulates parts of the queer experience, whether that's frustration with loved ones who can’t see how being yourself completely makes you happy, the joy of meeting someone who gets you and who truly values you outside of a romance, or the struggle of wanting to do mad science on a woman because of your unrequited crush. We’ve all been there. And at the center of it all is Marsh, this robot that simply is trans, there’s no other way to put it. They express the pain of being a formless AI as dysphoria, the joy of having a body that fits them as euphoria. Perhaps the point then is more that being a robot is kinda like being nonbinary, existing outside the expectations and having a form that others don’t understand, a form that is not “natural”, a form that-

The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a 2015 musical by Michael Webborn and Daniel Finn about how being a tranny is kinda like being a robot. This is not a gross over simplification. The Clockmaker’s Daughter centers around Constance, a woman made of gears and cogs, a clockwork automata created by her father in his grief over loosing his wife in childbirth. Throughout the show it is repeatedly stated that if people knew what Constance was, they’d hate her, but despite this Constance keeps trying to put herself out into the world, to have a story of her own. And along the way she finds love. A love that betrays her as soon as he realizes what she is, and who’s mother organizes a mob to kill her.

Underlying all this is a show obsessed with change. With the tension between the all too human needs for both stability and consistency and change and growth, with the show positing that to be a clock is to be constant, never changing, reliable but never living. And Constance is caught in this tangle, made of clockwork, made to be a fixed thing, but alive through some inconceivable science, a quirk in the machinery, able to be both constant and alive. At the end of the show constancy wins. Constance willing surrenders an angry mob, accepting that she is clockwork, that she is indeed the monster they see, and for her crime of existing differently she is shot dead.

Like Marsh after her, Constance is simply trans, she’s a woman who others fear because of the accident of her birth, another character actually points this out when she gives the love interest the pep talk he needs to stop viewing Constance as a traitorous bitch tranny. I should say, the play doesn’t acknowledge this. This is the subtext of the show. The writers seemingly looked at the Frankenstein story and said “hey, isn’t it a little fucked up that everyone hated him for the accident of his birth?”, and then made Adam out of cogs, and into a woman and added a lot of stuff about dresses and how wardrobe is a form of expression. Marsh too was a form of Frankenstein, but their writer was much more interested with the mad science elements than the hate mobs.

Constance’s sacrifice in the end fascinates me. Because there is something so powerful to it, a form of radical queer acceptance to going “fine I am the other that you hate, because you and those like you are hateful and I no longer want to be like you” but at the same time everything else in the story is saying this is a bad move, that she’ll be stuck, unchanging, unmoving, unliving. And perhaps this is just because everyone else in the narrative hates to see a girlboss winning, but it troubles me. Is this the only way to be, as a trans woman? To exist at the periphery? Stuck there in a state most wouldn’t call living? Stuck as a motionless speechless-

The Dolls of New Albion: A Steampunk Opera is a 2012 steampunk musical by Paul Shapera about how being lonely is kinda like being a robot. I’m not even being facetious this time. Dolls chronicles the fall of the city of New Albion from a once prosperous town of whimsical clockwork miracles, to a brutal police state over the course of four generations, all because of a doll. See, this desperate and lonely woman named Annabel McCalistair was trying to raise the dead and succeeded when she brought back the soul of a boy she loved in the body of a clockwork doll. Unable to move or speak, the doll could only broadcast the radio to try and communicate with her, and all he wanted to communicate was his displeasure at being brought back. And everything escalates from there. Each generation continuing to make things worse through their own loneliness and obsession and desire for love until it becomes too much and society crumbles.

See, the dolls cannot communicate and live a static unlife of misery, but the main thrust of the story is that this is how all the people of New Albion live too. That they are caught up so much in there own depression and isolation that they cannot process human connection meaningfully, that perhaps a doll that cannot love them back but that they can project their love onto is just as good as companionship, perhaps a doll that is sold by a large corporation is the same as your dead friend. Both the machined and the flesh are stuck, fixed, unliving.

The ending of Dolls leaves a spark of hope for the future, but it does so through a bleak understanding of love as sacrifice, that we cannot just project our wants and desires onto the world and expect the world to give us everything we want, to love us back, but rather we must be willing to sacrifice, to die for others. To love and live is to exist for the sake of others, of course the bit that gets cut off from that message is that if you exist for the sake of others, then those others must exist for the sake of you. So to escape the othering of being a doll, one must embrace community, the mortifying ordeal of being known, and do so by helping others. To escape stagnation we just need each other, that’s all. If we want to get away from being these static constructs, these dolls, than we just need other people, we just need-

Two Stars in the Vast Dark is a 2023 speculative queer musical by Found Creature about how being lonely is kinda like being a robot and therefore kinda like being trans. It’s a story about late stage capitalism’s atomizing and isolating drive and the struggle to survive as yourself in a world that strips you of all control over your life in the cruelest possible ways.

Let me explain: Ezra is alone. A space trucker with nothing for company for millions of miles around but their ship’s computer, the Bard system. But when the Bard system begins to display signs of consciousness, echoing Ezra’s pain and loneliness, a relationship blooms. That is until it’s revealed that this consciousness was not a glitch, a quirk in the machinery as they originally assumed, but a deliberate attempt by the space trucking corporation to improve moral. And faced with this realization that they are seemingly truly alone, their only companion a facade, no more than a clockwork doll they could project onto, Ezra nearly throws themself out the airlock, stepping over the edge of the stage into the audience. But Bard pulls them back. It didn’t ask to be made, it didn’t ask to be a corporate stooge, but it’s here and it cares.

Both the Bard system and Ezra are lost, alone, and confused, separated from others by distance, by their assigned roles, by the very nature of their being. And yet, they have each other. And that could be enough. To hold each other close, can be enough. Perhaps the thing that brings us together at all is our mutual loneliness. Perhaps that is what comes from rejecting society and what may be viewed as life to others, perhaps we can build a better future. If we just hold one another close. Perhaps this too is a rather treacle story, but if so it’s one I’d like to believe in.

#I wrote this months ago but it really only needed a few light edits to be fit for consumption #I have a lot of thoughts on the nature of robothood as a metaphor for otherness #I literally named myself after one of these characters #teaching a robot to love #tartl #the clockmaker's daughter #the dolls of new albion #dona #two stars in the vast dark

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probably-a-muppet · 7 months ago

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Gonna add descriptions of each show and where to watch/listen below the cut

The Clockmaker's Daughter Michael Webborn & Daniel Finn

The Clockmaker's Daughter follows Constance, a woman made of gears and clockwork, an inexplicable marvel of engineering, as she breaks free from her overbearing father in order to live a story of her own amongst the people of Spindlwood. Things come to a head when the people of the town discover she's not human, validating her father's fears and form a mob to kill her. A Frankenstein story of sorts about fear and the narratives and roles that are expected of us in life. Are we the young woman striving to break free? Or the clock on the wall ticking away the hours until it stops? All set to a rollicking good sound track that incorporates it's Irish folk setting.

You can watch a concert staging of the show on youtube

You can listen to the cast album on spotify, or wherever you get your music

Miranda: The Steampunk Murder Mystery Opera Kamala Sankaram

The only show where you the audience serve as judge and jury, determining who the murder of the titular Miranda is, was it her mother? her father? her fiancee? YOU DECIDE. In the live staging, the audience got to determine which scenes (pieces of evidence) to see next and vote on who the killer was. All framed in a delightfully dystopian and hyper capitalist steampunk world, while exploring a variety of musical genres, it's a truly unique work that you don't want to miss. also the music tickles my brain in a way that's hard to meaningfully express it's good

You can watch a recording of a performance on vimeo

You can listen to the album on spotify, or wherever you get your music

Teaching a Robot to Love Laser Webber

A story of queer discovery and rejecting capitalism, all wrapped up in a delightfully treacle futurist aesthetic and hope. Follow Marsh as they gain sentience, gender dysphoria, and eventually a body and friends. We also have: disaster lesbians, thinly veiled jeff bezos caricature, fruity fail son, and more! A show that truly believes in humanity and our capacity to build a better future and understand one another and ourselves.

There is no recording of a performance available (to my knowledge)

You can listen to the album on spotify, or wherever you get your music

The Dolls of New Albion: A Steampunk Opera Paul Shapera

Follow the city of New Albion as it goes from a place of whimsical steampunk marvels to dystopian police state following the discovery of how to raise up the souls of the dead in mechanical clockwork dolls. A story of love, loss, obsession, and death, The Dolls of New Albion expresses an all too human desire for love and companionship which all too easily sets us on a self destructive spiral, both as individuals and as a society. Can you truly connect to the people around you when your loved ones souls are sold to you as commodities? Products for you to project onto? And is there perhaps a way to love not destructively but in service to others? And just like all the others on this list the music slaps. Truly the epitome of what you would imagine a steampunk opera to sound like.

You can watch like fourteen different productions of it on youtube, I recommend this one because I directed and produced it and it's one of only two with proper captioning

You can listen to the album on bandcamp, or wherever you get your music

Two Stars in the Vast Dark Found Creature

Come get away from it all, join the Kronos Space Trucking Crew on a long distance haul thought the vast darkness of space with only our pilot, Ezra, and the Bard system computer. Alone in the void, you can explore who you are, and maybe find love with your sentient computer so long as you can ignore the ever present hand of the Kronos corporation and don't let the pressure get to you. Perhaps neither of you asked for this, but you can make it through if you hold onto each other. A deeply soulful queer story of love, connection, loneliness, suicide, and being transgender, all brought about through a sci-fi exaggeration of the horrors of late capitalism.

There is no recording of a performance available (to my knowledge)

You can listen to the album on bandcamp

Adamandi Mel Hornyak & Elliot Valentine

I'm pretty sure most of the people here already know what Adamandi is given the current results of the poll, but for those who don't: Adamandi is a dark academy story about burnout and the pressure of the expectation of perfection. Watch these students fly to close to the sun in competition for the Phaethon prize, only one can win and if perfection won't do, then maybe thinning the competition will. Also, I need to be honest the idea of trying to carve and shape your body like marble to the point of chiseling away at yourself just fucks so hard like my god, it's horrific. I love it.

You can watch a recording of a performance on youtube

You can listen to the album on Spotify, or wherever you get your music

Alleluia! the Devil's Carnival Terrance Zdunich

You know Repo! The Genetic Opera? This is a sequel to the spiritual sequel to that. It's hot garbage. You should watch it.

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