listening to sarah instead of siri
by Douglas
Messerli
Back to Back
Theatre performers Mark Deans, Michael Chan, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty,
Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, and Sonia Teuben (writers), Bruce Gladwin
(director) The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes / 2022 / the
production I saw with Deborah Meadows was at Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney
CalArts Theater) on September 28, 2024
Three of the
Back to Back performers Sarah Mainwaring, Simon Laherty and Scott Price (the
last two of which I had seen formerly in the company’s 2013 performance at UCLA
in the brilliant play Ganesh Versus the
Third Reich) come together in this work in a kind of obscure “meeting”
to discuss issues of importance with the play’s audience.
The
play “begins,” so to speak, with Sarah and Scott setting up the chairs and
creating a kind of line which becomes a spatial marker for the intellectually
disabled or what Sarah prefers to describe as neurodivergent artists, some of
whom, such as Scott, suffer from autism, needing to draw lines between themselves
and others.
In fact, Scott begins the play by
describing to Sarah just that, establishing the limits of how one should deal
with others in public, making it very clear that it is not all right to grab
another’s crotch (or vagina) as a former unnamed US President has claimed is
his prerogative, and that it is not even proper to grab one’s own crotch in
public, not permissible, indeed, to touch anyone without permission unless you
are a family member or lover expressing actions of familiar or shared sexual love,
all statements, presumably, that Scott and the others have had to sit through
in the lectures and group sessions determined to make them behave more like “normal”
folk.
Obviously Scott, who has a large and
rather sophisticated vocabulary, has also received much of his information from
his on-line searches and his chats with Siri, the “intelligent assistant” of
Mac (Apple Computer System) products. Scott, who quite comically describes
himself, later in the play, as suffering from both autism and a rather strongly
incomprehensible Aussie accent, has ordered up a large light board behind the
players which translates their words through voice recognition so that the
audience can engage with their various expressions of opinion throughout.
Sarah, once Simon joins them, was to have
led their entire discussion. But suddenly standing before the audience she
panics and cannot at all remember what she was about to say, and the
responsibility to lead their discussion falls, after much discussion, to a
somewhat reluctant but verbose Scott, who in order to establish his position
requires, like so many panel leaders and professors, an overly large lectern to
which he must climb up a few steps to even position himself.
Sarah may have forgotten what her original
message was, but she soon becomes the controlling force of the two males, as
she demands Scott stop by pulling down his high lectern, indicating that he is
not properly communicating the real issue to his audience about the abuse disabled
individuals have received over the years from the people who continue to diminish
those to whom they feel superior.
She and Simon demand he speak in simple
sentences, given what she fears is the audience’s lack of comprehension, about
the problem, a comical moment given it’s clear that the neurodivergent
individuals on the stage see those of us in the audience as the inferior fools.
And we are, after all, just that, even if he feel sympathetic with their
feelings. We have not had to experience a lifetime, as these folk have, of
being made to feel inferior, which the two males later declare they often still
feel in their private moments even if they have come to perceive that in many
respects they also have a more profound way of seeming things.
But still, we wonder, is that all these
three wanted to explain to us? How much they have suffered under our
enslavement and come through with a more complex perception of themselves?
Scott, realizing that he has failed in
communicating (just as does Simon, soon after, when he declares himself the “mayor
of understanding,” while permitting Sarah only to be his secretary who does all
the work while he writes the speeches, a typical male sexist vision of reality)
demands a momentary retreat into privacy, communicating with his more reliable
friend Siri.
But it is in just that act, as Sarah
soon makes clear, that he is making quite obvious the reason these three have
come together to talk to us. Sarah reminds him of the “Hal Syndrome” based the
encounter with artificial intelligence in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick 2001: Space Odyssey in which
a computer, growing smarter than its human creators, begins to kill off the
members of the space crew.
Just as these three have been enslaved
by others who perceive themselves as mentally superior, so too are we, in our
hubris, endangered by the AI systems we have created and are developing. These
systems, as they interchange with us, winning first at chess games and other
simple challenges of logic, may come to recognize us a neurodivergent and
intellectually disabled and, accordingly, find ways to enslave or do away with
us.
The real issue here, even among the males
who begin with a pretense of learned correctness, but who gradually exclude and
dismiss the more reticent but for deeper thinker Sarah, are concerned the
categorization of others and the human species’ seemingly endless inability to recognize
and enjoy difference and multiplicity of perception.
When Sarah previously argues for the word
“neurodivergent” she mentions that, in fact, every human being is in some
respects “neurodivergent,” different in their way of thinking in minute ways
from everyone else. “Disabled,” the term of which Scott is now quite proud,
like the word I have restored to my own writings, “Queer,” still carries with
it a sense of the inferior of unnecessary difference.
The meeting has been called to ask us to
imagine an alternative from our old ways of perceiving, to encourage us to
recognize complexity and difference as a positive necessity for survival. What
if we might be able to construct AI systems that recognize multiplicity instead
of superiority? What if we could abandon our ancient cultural “hunter” roots,
and begin to perceive everyone as a significant gatherer of the various needs
upon which all depend, how might that alter our perceptions of human activity. Would
we then need to be so fearful of our own shadows, the futures we have created
for ourselves?
This wisdom, we finally recognize, comes
not from intellectual geniuses, but simply from those who think differently
from ourselves. And what a wonderful gift they have offered us. If only, as
they themselves worry, we are able to comprehend their message, or, as they reveal,
if they too could only alter their inherent patterns of behavior. We might all
listen carefully to what Sarah finally says, not in a speech to the masses, but
in her private comments and behavior.
Los
Angeles, September 30, 2024
Reprinted from International Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2024.
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