There's something just so French about Nathalie Claude's one-woman, three-robot show Salon Automaton, which had its English-language debut at Buddies this week.
Claude's introductory monologue, with its polite bluster and assertive indirectness, has a Proustian quality, as does the very idea of a Friday night salon where the The Dandy Poet, The Cabaret Artist and The Drinking Patroness gather to entertaining their obliging hostess, who serves them champagne and cucumber sandwiches, whether they are able to eat it or not.
For the first hour of the two-hour production (which is about 30 or 40 minutes too long by my nodding-off measure; the original French version is apparently a bit shorter), this circuitousness is something of a theatrical strategy, a distraction from what the audience is seeing on stage. Which is an overeager woman talking to three seated robots, each with a moving mouth, a soothing voice and a set of proscribed movements which include emphatic gesturing but, alas, not eating. While the hostess chatters away--sometimes about human existence, sometimes about nothing particularly memorable--we're unsure whether she knows her company is spring-loaded, whether the guests themselves know they are robots or what kind of world has created this situation.
The reveal is slow, much too slow, and somewhat beside the point. The show has far less to say about the "why" of how humans find themselves turning to mechanical companions than "how," which is to say, with apprehension and naive optimism. When you've created an illusion designed to protect you from the vagaries of human behaviour, anything less than perfection might very well drive you bonkers.
The production works best when it's showing, not telling. We see Claude as all-too-human, blathering over-dramatically like a nervous hostess filling gaps in the conversation, so when the automatons (voiced by Clinton Walker, Moynan King and Leni Parker) offer up their scripted, banal cliches, they come as something of a relief. Their speech and motion are restricted, but fascinating nonetheless. They're playing to type because they have been created as types and there's theatrical pleasure in having our own perceptions of the world mirrored back to us, confirmed as accurate, even if that accuracy emerges out of our own manipulations.
Claude's core idea is a spot-on critique of our increasingly personal relationship with technology, even as it suffers from the very human trait of overkill.
