Chicago News Cooperative

Chibots Prepare for Debut in ‘Heddatron’

By JESSICA REAVES
Published: February 10, 2011

An hour before the start of Tuesday night’s penultimate dress rehearsal, half the cast of Sideshow Theatre Company’s “Heddatron” was making a lot of noise — lunging and stretching, their voices swooping through a range of warm-up exercises. Downstage, the cast members Billy-bot and Hans stood apart, occasionally flexing an arm or a neck joint, winking at curious onlookers and, when provoked, beeping loudly. 

Appearances to the contrary, Billy-bot and Hans are not divas.

They are robots, preparing for their debut Friday at the Chicago premiere of Elizabeth Meriwether’s dystopian fantasy. Part of Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s second annual Garage Rep series, which highlights “innovative, young companies,” “Heddatron” tells the story of Jane Gordon, a disconsolate Michigan housewife whose existential spiral into suicidal depression is rudely interrupted by a rogue band of self-aware robots. They spirit her off to Ecuador and force her to perform scenes from Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler.”

Billy-bot and Hans have the most time onstage, but they are only 2 of the 10 robots created for the show by members of the Chicago Area Robotics League, or Chibots. Five large robots are controlled remotely by cast members sitting offstage, and the remaining five are very small, autonomous “critter-bots,” which basically just zip around the stage for the last five minutes of the play.

Last year, when it was decided that Sideshow would perform “Heddatron,” Jonathan Green, the director, knew he had to address the robot issue.

“The script calls for real robots, so I Googled ‘Chicago’ and ‘robots,’ and I found Chibots,” Mr. Green said. “I e-mailed them and tried not to sound insane — I mean, it’s such a preposterous idea.”

But the next day, he had a reply. “They responded very calmly,” he said, “and said it sounded like an interesting project.”

Bruce Phillips, a member of the Sideshow company, controls Billy-bot (think Wall-E crossed with E.T.). “This guy needs to do a lot of things,” Mr. Phillips said. “We kept going to the engineers, asking, ‘Can you make him do this? Or this?’ And almost every time, they said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ “

Now, Mr. Phillips said, the engineers have a soft spot for Billy-bot because they spent so much time working on him. Eddy Wright, an engineer and member of Chibots, agreed, saying, “Billy is very expressive, and it took a lot of work to get his eyes and ears to a point where he could express emotion.”

But only to a point. “People asked us whether we were going to make them autonomous,” Mr. Wright said. “But we thought maybe having giant six-foot robots running around on their own wasn’t the best idea.”

If the technical glitches during Tuesday’s dress rehearsal were any indication, robot actors are not much easier to work with than their human counterparts.

“I’ve worked with some robotic actors before, but never actual robots,” Mr. Green said. “It’s a really interesting process — you think the robots are going to do the same thing every time. But they’re operated by remote control, by humans, many of whom are performers themselves.”

Designing and creating 10 robots is not cheap. In this case, it cost roughly $5,000, which Sideshow is trying to raise online at kickstarter.com. As of Wednesday, supporters had pledged $3,315.

Megan Smith, Sideshow’s managing director, said the company had also gotten help from the electronics stores and warehouses where Chibots’ engineers buy robot parts. “We got some really great pricing because it was for a nonprofit,” Ms. Smith said. “And everyone thought the project sounded cool.”

Mr. Wright also designed the control boards used to maneuver the robots around the stage. After Tuesday’s dress rehearsal, he pronounced himself “very happy” with their performances. “We’ve got a few kinks to work out,” he said. “The floor needs to be really clean, because otherwise the robots tend to get stuck.”

The biggest challenge, Mr. Wright said, was “making the way they act and move convey more than just a box moving around on stage.”

“Heddatron,” which is by turns raucously funny and crushingly bleak, has been performed only once before professionally, in 2006, by Les Frères Corbusier company of New York. That five-year lapse gives the robots in the Chicago production a certain advantage, Mr. Green said.

“We’re using the next generation of robots,” he said Tuesday as he leaned in to examine Billy-bot’s mechanical eyes. “They’re a little bit more functional, and safer.”

Was he referring to the tantalizing possibility that the robots, inspired by the play, might become sentient and take over the production?

No, Mr. Green said. “I just mean they’re less likely to tip over.”