Heddatron by Sideshow Theatre Company at Steppenwolf’s Merle Reskin Garage Theatre (Through April 24)
Promo pull quote: “It all starts with a book falling from the sky. Suddenly Jane Gordon, a very depressed and very pregnant Michigan housewife, finds herself kidnapped by a clan of renegade sentient robots and whisked away to the jungles of South America where she is forced to perform the title role in a mechanical version of Hedda Gabler.”
What it’s really about: Combining theater history, family dysfunction, and robots, Elizabeth Meriwether’s Heddatron is a hilarious, profound adventure into the absurd. As the unhinged Jane reads Hedda Gabler, her husband and daughter try to track her down with the help of a hillbilly arms dealer, while in the past, Henrik Ibsen weathers the abuse of his wife and August Strindberg. And there are robots! “The show premièred in New York in 2006, and I became aware of the show when our literary manager sent me The New York Times’ review of that production,” says director Jonathan L. Green. “It was a show we were kind of keeping in our back pocket, this show we thought was fascinating and really interesting, but obviously would take a lot of concentrated resources to pull off. When Steppenwolf presented us with the opportunity to produce a show there, we knew we had to go big or go home. So we collaborated with ChiBots, a Chicago-area robotics group, to design and engineer and program these robots.”
Fun fact: Sideshow knew that the robots would be the big draw for this production, and they’ve actually built five more robots than the five described in the script. These robots are each controlled by an individual operator, many of whom are performers themselves, and contain a number of surprising features. “One of the smaller details on the robots that I really like is that every robot has a manual kill switch hidden somewhere on their body, just in case it really does go out of control during a performance,” says Green. “On one of the robots it’s a VHS tape that if you hit, it immediately turns off. Another robot, if you press its belly button, it turns off. The robots have a lot of larger details, but those small things are the most interesting to me. We brought the robots into rehearsal at the beginning of January, and our actors have been real troopers. It doesn’t seem like it required as much of an adjustment as it might have. I think our actors understand that the robots are able to respond and interact a little bit. It’s not like "Pirates Of The Caribbean" where everything’s on the same track and always happens at the same time. There’s a little bit of flexibility in the robots’ performances, which I think makes it easier for the actors, and more exciting for them, too.”
Best reason to try: Heddatron takes a theater masterpiece, puts a modern spin on it, and then adds robots. There’s no reason not to try it. “It is the cheapest way to see 10 badass robots and nine badass actors in Chicago,” says Green, simply. And that’s all that needs to be said.