Computer: Friend, Foe, or . . . Sister?
You are reading this on a computer.
And computers are monumentally busy. According to the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth College:
. . . computers are not simply acting as word processors. Artists and art historians are creating and analyzing art, dance choreographers are modeling, synthesizing, and analyzing dance, psychologists are analyzing brain patterns, linguists are developing models of human and animal language, economists are modeling economic and social trends, biologists are sequencing the genome, chemists are discovering new compounds, physicists are exploring the origins of the universe, engineers are building smaller and more powerful microchips, and mathematicians are proving theorems.”
But you knew most of that. Artists are asking what, if anything, it all means.
Matthew Libby’s Sisters has won the 2022 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting. Established in 2018, the annual Neukom playwriting award considers plays and other full-length works for the theater that address the question, “What does it mean to be a human in a computerized world?” Those of us of a certain age are privileged to be able to ask the question, being situated temporally between an early life without computers and a second half in which computers have come to dominate life’s landscape. (As time goes on and particularly for younger people, the term “computerized world” will reduce simply to “world,” as they will have known no other.)
The award is a partnership between the Neukom Institute, the Department of Theater at Dartmouth College, and Northern Stage. This year’s winner comes from a shortlist of seven plays selected from 141 submissions. It will be directed by Northern Stage’s BOLD Resident Director Aileen Wen McGroddy.
Two public readings of Sisters will be held. The first is tonight, January 12, at Dartmouth College’s Filene Auditorium on Maynard Street in Hanover NH at 7:30 pm. The second reading will be on Friday, January 13 at Northern Stage’s Barrett Center in White River Junction, VT, also at 7:30 pm. Both performances are free, but reservations are required. (Click here.)
The play promises to span 90 years of a relationship between two sisters, Matilda and Greta “ . . growing up, learning from each other, dealing with responsibility and loss, fighting viciously, drifting apart, and eventually coming back together. They’re just like any other sisters. Oh, except Greta is an artificially intelligent computer program. But other than that . . .”
Sarah Wansley, the BOLD Associate Artistic Director at Northern Stage offered a comment about what makes this play unique: “So many stories about the future of AI are centered on male characters. Matthew’s choice to place two women at the heart of this investigation and explore their relationship over decades is as fresh as it is theatrically compelling.”
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.