MILPITAS, CALIF.: Rapid Eye Repertory, a Silicon Valley theatre firm based final 12 months in a novel partnership between forward-thinking tech builders and modern theatremakers, has introduced its debut 2023-24 season, which is able to embrace 5 new performs authored completely by Rapid Eye’s personal proprietary AI program, RETina.
“At its essence, theatre is nothing more than words and performance, which is why we are thrilled to launch this experiment at the intersection of the newest frontier of text creation and one of the world’s most ancient art forms,” stated Hunt Carbondale, creative director and lead developer of Rapid Eye Rep. “We think these five new plays, created by our groundbreaking RETina program, showcase an astonishing new dramatic voice that points the way to the future of theatre.”
RETina, developed from language studying code beforehand designed to jot down warning labels for hair merchandise, reportedly spent most of a latest afternoon absorbing everything of Western stage literature, from Euripides to Lynn Nottage—“kind of like a crash-course virtual MFA,” as Carbondale put it—and commenced to generate potential performs nearly instantly. Its preliminary efforts had been spinoff and wildly variable in high quality, Carbondale conceded, however these deficiencies had been offset by subsequent coding that integrated Grotowski, Viewpoints/Suzuki coaching, and ComedySportz.
The season will kick off in September at Rapid Eye’s newly constructed Čapek Theatre with Echoes within the Canyon, an unsettling drama a few group of mates, reunited after a long time aside, who confront their previous by taking part in a lethal sport of Spin the Bottle.
Next, in November, is Breaking Bread, a poignant comedy/drama a few household of immigrants from an unnamed Latin American nation who collect in a serious Midwestern metropolis within the U.S. for the funeral of their much-loved and much-hated patriarch, the place they rediscover the bonds of household and the facility of meals to deliver individuals collectively.
The potential of AI to combine and match genres might be showcased by Rapid Eye’s vacation providing, Mad Lib Carol, through which Dickens’s basic Christmas story might be staged within the kinds of movie noir, Caryl Churchill, and Balinese shadow puppetry.
Kicking off 2024 with a bang might be The Intersection, a strong interrogation of race, gender, and sophistication in modern America, designed to be enacted by one actor and an viewers volunteer who might be chosen randomly simply earlier than every night time’s efficiency.
The season’s last introduced providing, opening in March 2024, might be a collaborative improv experiment referred to as Love Language, through which theatregoers will collaborate dwell by way of their gadgets with RETina to crowdsource a script mashing up their numerous prompts, with a troupe of six actors available to cold-read the outcomes on the spot.
A last spring present has but to be programmed, however Carbondale recommended that it might be Rapid Eye’s boldest experiment but.
“We’re working on a play in which not only the script but the design and direction will be created by AI,” he stated. “There is still, for the time being, a need for actual human beings to do stage and house management, and to act in the plays, but our programmers are working on an AI solution for that too.”