We’re trying to produce a version of Brighton Beach Memoirs, cast with robots, but we need the author’s permission, brokered by Samuel French. We’re still waiting for that permission. If we don’t get it, what can we do?

The nice thing about Brighton Beach Memoirs as a text is that the idea of casting it with robots is inherently incongruous, surprising and difficult in execution. Our first thought was
Hamlet, but that’s a play that’s been done to death in all possible interpretations, switching every element of the play from era to gender to geography.

There are already a lot of connections between Hamlet and robotics (or at least technology), from Heiner Muller’s Hamlet Machine to Nam June Paik’s Hamlet Robot.

There’s been a student production on the Moon with Polonius and Ophelia as robots. There’s even a Youtube video of people dressed as robots enacting scenes from Hamlet in parking lot.

And there’s a six-legged robot designed at the University of Canterbury, named after the Prince of Denmark. (Interestingly non-humanoid.)

The result is that Hamlet, in our opinion, has been rubbed smooth of any assumptions and specifics in terms of production. Anybody can do anything with it, and has. The valuable thing about Brighton Beach Memoirs is that it is recent, naturalistic, and comes with a very specific set of expectations in terms of time, place, character, and interpretation.

An interesting option would be J.M. Barry’s Peter Pan. It’s been done many, many times, but almost always within a fairly narrow interpretation, with the same specifics in terms of character, setting, etc. We have high expectations of seeing the same basic production when we go to see Peter Pan. A robotic Peter Pan might be almost (but not quite) as difficult and jarring as a robotic Brighton Beach Memoirs.

We could find few links between Peter Pan and robotics, although there is a nice radio-controlled airplane out there called “Peter Pan”, and a parody of Peter Pan failing to teach Wendy and the boys to fly once appeared on the animated TV show Robot Chickens.

But Brighton Beach Memoirs is still our favorite. Let’s hope we get the rights.