Theatre in Review: The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence (Playwrights Horizons)

	Amanda Quaid. Photo: Joan Marcus

The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence gives a twist to the classic romantic comedy setup: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl gets operating system. It's a story that plays out in multiple periods, mixing historical figures with fictional characters and real scientific advancements with flights of fancy. It's meant to be a dazzling puzzle with something to say about the perversity of the human heart, but the result is a play as muddled as its heroine is lucid.

She is Eliza, a computer whiz who, having departed IBM under a cloud (and not a digital one), has launched her own startup. It is 2011, when IBM's Watson supercomputer triumphed over human intelligence on an episode of Jeopardy! Eliza plans to take Watson's functionality one giant leap further, creating a kind of software-driven companion who can meet its owner's every need. Currently, Eliza is not taking phone calls from Merrick, her ex-husband; instead, she sits at home, making conversation with a robot, subsisting on a diet of Jim Beam and Twizzlers and planning her pitch to a venture capital firm.

Meanwhile, Merrick, who is running for city auditor on a Tea Party-style platform, falls into conversation with Watson, the IT guy hired to fix his computer. Getting personal, Merrick confesses that he fears Eliza is planning dirty tricks against his campaign; he hires Watson to tail her. Watson proves to be spectacularly incompetent at private eye work, and Eliza unmasks him almost instantly, which doesn't stop her from falling into bed with him. The morning after brings an agonizing dilemma: How can Eliza possibly be attracted to a man with only one pair of pants? Worse, she adds, "His favorite restaurant is Applebee's. He's a huge, huge Billy Joel fan. He went to Medieval Times for his birthday and described it without irony as one of the greatest nights of his life, and yet I can't get enough of him, I can't get enough of him."

Rather than dwell on this romantic comedy mismatch -- think Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen in Knocked Up -- playwright Madeline George sends us back to the 19th century, where, at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes is out, but Dr. Watson receives a distressed young woman named ... Eliza. She is seeking information about her husband, named Merrick, who is "extremely well-known in thermodynamic circles," having invented something called the Merrick Greaseless Piston. Believing that she chose a man of intellect, Eliza finds herself hostage to her husband's rages and paranoia; in addition, there is the matter of the strange indentations on her arm, which she cannot explain.

Before we are allowed to pursue this mystery, we are whisked off to a radio studio at Bell Labs in the 1930s, where Thomas A. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell's assistant and the recipient of the first telephone message, is being interviewed; the woman asking the questions is named -- you guessed it -- Eliza. Watson admits to being little more than a helper to a great man but adds, "Connection isn't elegant, or precise, or rational. But it's our fate to be bound up with one another, isn't it?" Driving home the point, he says, "If we did not rely upon each other so deeply, our nation would not now be strung like a vast, glittering web with eight million miles of connecting wire."

Sadly, connecting with the characters in George's play proves next to impossible, as all these Watsons, Merricks, and Elizas are merely cogs in the author's often-clumsy dramatic machinery, which boils down to a debate between connectedness and independence in different technological eras. Never as witty or as clever as it needs to be, the play sags under the weight of its conceptual framework. The Baker Street Watson plot is left hanging for most of the running time, until an eleventh-hour revelation of the 19th-century Merrick's plan to create a kind of mechanical woman, an enterprise that mirrors the 20th-century Eliza's concept of a digital manservant. The Bell Telephone Watson gets very little stage time, as he exists only to articulate the play's theme.

That leaves us with the modern plot. George gets some laughs out of the digital Watson's stock responses to Eliza's overly complex questions, but the romantic triangle -- or is it a quadrilateral? - falls flat. Merrick is a self-involved blowhard; it is impossible to believe that the brilliant Eliza would have ever spent more than five minutes with him. Eliza's romance with the human Watson is never really believable, and when it bogs down in her ambivalence, it becomes actively alienating. George's characters are forever turning to technology for the comfort they should get from other people -- but because they come off as little more than authorial pawns, their problems are never very interesting.

The best reason to see The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence is Amanda Quaid, who can switch characters in the blink of an eye, as the various Elizas, distinguishing each of them by the subtlest of means. John Ellison Conlee is equally appealing as all the Watsons, especially as the digital edition, who is frankly baffled by Eliza's confessions. David Costabile is less lucky, being saddled with the least interesting characters, especially the present-day Merrick. But that's the way it goes in Leigh Silverman's wildly uneven production, which struggles to pull together the play's many untidy threads. Louisa Thompson's nondescript setting stands in for Eliza's loft apartment, Holmes and Watson's sitting room, the modern Merrick's office, and a Victorian train station among other locations, but even then, an old-fashioned curtain is needed to cover the scene changes. Anita Yavich's costumes seem designed for quick changes first and last. Mark Barton's lighting and Matt Tierney's sound design are perfectly adequate.

The play ends in a long, drawn-out scene between the modern-day Eliza and Merrick that leaves one with the dispirited feeling that an awful lot of work has been expended on very little. "I just mean, I'm connected to them," says Eliza. "Other people. Everywhere around us. Everywhere around us." And how many storylines are needed to make this point? -- David Barbour