Brainiacs! This enticing show is for you

'Futurity' show asks questions about artficial intelligence and its uses that are driving science today

It’s finally here: a musical made for brainiacs! Futurity, an odd and often beguiling show written by César Alvarez with his band the Lisps, could send science geeks into the kind of swoon that befalls more traditional musical theatre lovers at a great production of, oh, anything by Stephen Sondheim.

History buffs might want to take a look, too, since the show is set during the tumultuous late days of the Civil War, and features as one of its two principal characters an actual historical figure, Ada Lovelace, the pioneering British mathematician whose writings were among the first to prefigure the creation of computers.

And despite its period setting, this frisky furrowed brow of a musical asks questions about artificial intelligence and its uses that are driving science today, such as whether computers can ever develop an ‘imagination’ similar to man’s, and how exactly the mysteries of the human brain might be untangled.

Random lyric sample, from the musings of Ada, who is portrayed with poise and lively intelligence by Sammy Tunis: “What’s the animating force from which intelligence emerges/ Is it material in nature or a spiritual convergence/ Are the particles inside the brain the meaning or the medium of life.” Chew on that for a while, and get back to me.

Futurity, which opened recently at the Connelly Theater as a coproduction between two of Broadway’s best (and brainiest) theatre companies, Soho Rep and Ars Nova, also features some of the most lovely and inventive music you can hear on a New York stage right now, folk-inflected ballads and anthems, with lyrics by Alvarez and music by Alvarez and the Lisps, that manage to sound both entirely contemporary and eerily of the past.

Alvarez plays the other main character, Julian Munro, a (fictional) Union soldier heading into battle as the Civil War rages to a bloody climax. He’s no regular grunt, however, but a dreamer whose horror of war and its destruction leads him to imagine a machine that would generate ‘other options’ for resolving human conflict.

As Ada puts it when he impulsively writes of his dream to her and they begin a correspondence, “A machine that creates peace.”

The Steam Brain

Directed by Sarah Benson, artistic director of Soho Rep, the musical is structured loosely, with few discrete scenes and little interaction among its small cast of characters — Ada and Julian are, after all, separated by an ocean. It often feels more like a staged oratorio with some heaping spoonfuls of dialogue thrown in than a fully fleshed-out musical.

As Julian and his battalion prepare to head into battle under the direction of the General (a forceful Karen Kandel), they sing rousing songs to lift their sagging spirits, and perform the fresh, fluid vernacular choreography of David Neumann.

At the same time, Julian and Ada begin exchanging letters discussing the possible creation of Julian’s peace-spreading contraption, settling on steam as the most viable source of energy. The name they give their vision: the Steam Brain.

While the soldiers mostly sing simple, haunting lyrics that might have been written back in the period in which the musical is set, some of Alvarez’s lyrics pertaining to the machine can lean toward nonsensical: “Steam brain is a chance for the dance of the land lovin’ friends of the man made/ It’s a first name on a tag that you need for the breed and the cost of your mainframe/ It’s a cut vein in the back of your mind break it down while they build it’s a shame train.” Fortunately, the jaunty rockabilly music to which they are sung pulls you along with its brisk rhythms, so you have little time to be perplexed.

Of the past, present

Eventually, the panelled wall at the back of the stage is deconstructed to reveal the Steam Brain, a fantastical-looking contraption (it also serves as a giant percussion instrument) created by the set designers Emily Orling and Matt Saunders in collaboration with Farber, who mans the machine. Picture the innards of a Swiss watch clicking away, magnified a few hundred times.

Admirable though its questing spirit can be, the densely cerebral lyrics and dialogue for Julian and Ada sometimes spiral in circles or fly off in puzzling directions.
Ada: “How could a thinking machine destroy the institution of slavery?”
Julian: “Could the intelligence of the machine spread, like a virus?”
Ada: “Ignorance may be better at spreading.”

Julian: “An improved ability to process information will lead to better information: a technology of morality.”
Ada: “Is morality made of information?”
Julian: “I don’t know.”
I’m with you there, at least, Julian. Much as one may admire Alvarez’s free-floating imagination and his bold conflation of past and present, these wonky-talk passages — sung or spoken — can get so baggy you feel your own brain getting steamed up.

This is despite the gracefully laid-back performance of Alvarez, whose strong voice has a purity that helps smooth over the roller coasters of words he’s singing. Tunis, dressed by Orling in a contemporary outfit in contrast to the military uniforms the others wear, also flits nimbly through the thickets of language, and sings with a similar bright, clear tone.
“All the math doesn’t come out quite right,” runs one of the show’s more straightforward lyrics. At a certain level that’s how I felt about Futurity, which could use more rigorous editing so that its striking ideas and songs would stand out more distinctly.

But how refreshing to meet a musical that has too much on its mind, rather than too little. A show that name-checks Socrates, Copernicus, Pythagoras, Mary Shelley and Abraham Lincoln — all in one song, yet — can only help advance an art form that often seems unable to imagine itself a new future.