Theatre in Review: Futurity (Soho Rep and Ars Nova/Connelly Theater)

	César Alvarez. Photo: Ben Arons

Progress is a slippery, slippery thing: We want to believe in it, no matter how many times we've been disappointed. No matter how terrible things may be, we always want to believe that the next thinker, philosophy, or technological development will be the thing that will heal the world of all its ills. And yet humanity seems to forever exist on two levels: Even as we continue to make fantastic progress, providing at least part of the world with a standard of living otherwise unknown in history, so much of the world remains in turmoil, some of it a charnel house. These thoughts occurred to me while watching Futurity, a wildly original, often stunningly staged musical theatre piece that, in its own sideways manner, confronts something very dark in human nature.

A kind of cross between a Socratic dialogue and a pop concert, Futurity imagines that Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician, and, with her Analytical Engine, the mother of computer science, was engaged in an intense intellectual correspondence with Julian Munro, a Union soldier in the Civil War. Writing to Ada, Julian wonders, "I know what you're thinking: A machine is not a mind/But couldn't the mechanics of a machine be completely redesigned/To adapt and grow as only an organism can/A revolution of solutions that could move beyond the intellect of man?" Ada thinks not, although she is hard-pressed to explain why. Still, she is intrigued by his line of thought.

And Julian pursues the argument with vigor. "Humans are flawed," he says. "A machine with a creative facility would be designed by mathematics. It would be pure, unselfish." Ada, quite reasonably, replies, "Nature is mathematical. And selfishness is quite natural." But, says Julian, "A thinking machine would be free from base animal instinct." Ada adds, "It sounds like you are trying to devise a reality in which you don't have a gun pointed at you."

Ada, with typical precision, has touched on the heart of the matter. Julian, whose daily life is mired in mud and blood and marked by endless marching or mass killing, is looking for a god of progress, of intellectual achievement to believe in. He wins her over, and together they collaborate on the development of the "steam brain," which is presented to a skeptical assembly known as the Society of Scientists.

Meanwhile, Julian's company is deployed to destroy a key rail supply line to the Rebel Army, and, while Ada remains unsure about Julian's ideas, he forges ahead, adumbrating the Internet: ''What if connecting billions of points of view into a thinking device would allow a more humane consciousness to emerge?" Of course, what ultimately did emerge from that connection was a universe of shaming campaigns, conspiracy theories, and cat videos, but Julian, perhaps blessedly, cannot know that.

A supreme act of dramatic irony, Futurity uses song, dialogue, and movement to explore the confounding gap between humankind's intellectual achievements and moral failings. In the script by César Alvarez, who also plays Julian, the exchanges between him and Ada are always nimble, rendering complicated, often dispiriting thoughts with the elegance of epigrams. The score combines new songs by Alvarez and his band The Lisps, which explore the play's arguments in melodies that ape the often rambling manner of human thought, with traditional folk numbers like "Cumberland Gap," which help to ground the action in the milieu of an America at war with itself. Alvarez and Sammy Tunis, as Ada, play together with a lightness of tone that contrasts strikingly with the ideas that they share. The other major character is Julian's general, played by Karen Kandel. She seems to be speaking both for herself, as a black woman, and her character, when she says, "I don't know what it's going to take, but I suspect that even when I can no longer be claimed as property my body will still be in even greater danger. How do you convince someone that you are human when they're willing to die to prove you wrong?" Words that chill -- and that seem all too reflective of today's front page news.

Sarah Benson has taken what is essentially a song cycle punctuated with dialogue and given it an imaginative, and, for downtown theatre, enormous production. (It's no surprise that a co-production between Soho Rep and Ars Nova was necessary, and that neither of those theatres' houses was up to the demands Benson's staging.) The cast of 14 actor/musicians, dressed in army uniforms, designed by Emily Orling, that reflect several historical eras, are deployed all over the set, designed by Orling and Matt Saunders, which is backed by an upstage wall filled with holes -- it could a collection of dominoes or, perhaps, a set of data cards from an old-fashioned computer. During the course of the show, the wall is dismantled to expose a two-level structure, which eventually breaks apart to reveal a giant steampunk percussion machine attached to the theatre's upstage wall. (The "contraption design" is by Eric Farber.) The lighting, by Yi Zhao, ranges from some remarkably restrained, and beautiful, white light compositions to flashes of rock-concert color, often delivered in frenetic chase sequences. Given the Connelly Theater's generally poor acoustics -- this is nobody's first choice for a musical -- Matt Tierney's sound design maintains a surprising level of intelligibility in the musical numbers.

Not everything works: The scene with the Society of Scientists is marred by a self-conscious cutesiness right out of a production of Godspell, and, as the show progresses and becomes more surreal, the staging, rather than the words, holds it together. This, I suppose, is inevitable; having established its sad dichotomy between the world of the mind and the world of power and bloodshed, Alvarez mostly circles around it, finding new ways to express, as opposed to extending or complicating, it. Still, Futurity ends with an effective fantasia, "Socrates," in which Julian and Ada sing of their dreams of such visionaries Socrates, Copernicus, Pythagoras, and Mary Shelley, each encounter ending with them being left in the night. Then the entire company segues into the chorus of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It's a lovely moment. It's a chilling moment. In Futurity, those two feelings are never separated by more than a heartbeat. -- David Barbour