It’s man against machine in AntiMatter Collective’s sci-fi thriller MOTHERBOARD (photo by Jonathan Shaw)
The Secret Theatre
4402 23rd St., Long Island City
Thursday – Saturday through October 14, $18
1-800-838-3006
www.antimattercollective.org
www.secrettheatre.com/motherboard
It’s 2445, twenty years after humankind defeated an all-out attack by robots, who suddenly and inexplicably stopped fighting after having wiped out two-thirds of the earthlings in a ridiculously short amount of time. Scientist Gershwin Scott (James Rutherford) and war hero Captain Abraham Lennox (Casey Robinson) are experimenting on one of the supposedly deactivated machines (Rebecca Hirota) when the nannybot suddenly comes to life, exciting Scott, who wants to study it, and enraging Lennox, who wants to destroy it. Soon the robot, called C-12, is off on an adventure through a postapocalyptic world filled with scavenging survivors who are suspicious of strangers and understandably fearful of technology, save for Penelope (Elizabeth Bays), a young girl who illegally collects electronic gadgets. Staged by the Brooklyn-based AntiMatter Collective in the small Secret Theatre in Long Island City, Motherboard is a fun, if slight, sci-fi thriller wittily written by Adam Scott Mazer and playfully directed by Will Fulton. The company, whose previous shows include Gregory S. Moss’s sixsixsix (based on Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus), Mazer’s Death Valley, and Fulton’s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House, mix in elements of the Mad Max films, Star Trek, and other genre classics, along with some unexpected gore, in telling the age-old story of man versus machine. The best parts of the show are the relationships that develop in the beginning between C-12 and Scott (who, sadly, is not seen again) and in the end between C-12 and Penelope; unfortunately, much of what occurs in the long middle section, which centers around feral S&M couple Sweetums (Allison LaPlatney) and Maggot (Bryce Henry), is meandering and unnecessary. But even in this futuristic world, at the heart of society lies the bond between parent and child; it’s no accident that C-12 is a nannybot, responsible for the welfare of children, a theme that runs through all of the appropriately titled Motherboard.
(Note: The theater might want to rethink its policy of allowing people to bring drinks inside, as the night we went, bottles and cups kept getting kicked over, and two very drunk young women had to be told repeatedly to stop slurping their drinks and talking — which they eventually did, but then one of them got a bad case of the hiccups, and instead of leaving the theater she just kept on hiccupping, the sound echoing loudly throughout the space.)