“Daddy says … My daddy says that you’re my sister.”
This opening line from the intellectually and emotionally stirring play “Sisters,” now playing at Writers Theatre, is spoken by Matilda, just 6 years old as the work begins. Her sister — should that be in quotation marks? — is a computer.
“My body looks like a computer,” explains Matilda’s sister Greta, whom we experience only as a voice (Chloe Johnston). “But that does not mean I am not alive.”
Within a couple of minutes, playwright Matthew Libby (whose off-Broadway play “Data” followed developers at an artificial intelligence company) has pulled us right into the most current of topics. How human can AI become? What does being “alive” even mean? And from that opening scene, he poses a question we have barely begun contemplating: What will lives be like for the children — physical, corporeal, human ones — who will be native to co-existing with such beings, especially when, after decades of learning about us individually, they will know us better than anyone else?
Sort of like a sister.
“I will grow alongside you,” says Greta, who was created by Matilda’s father after her mother’s death. “And we will support each other as sisters do.”
We follow the relationship of these supposed siblings for the next 90 years, not always linearly. Libby jumps us forward to Matilda in her 40s, after a divorce and the death of her father, then back to when she was a teenager, eventually to when she’s elderly, and so on.
Although the larger, existential questions remain present, Libby has also crafted what amounts to a traditional drama about sisters. They love each other but also harbor jealousies — Matilda resents the attention Greta receives, first from her father and later from those who come to learn or write about her. Greta resents Matilda’s body, her ability to exist in the world and “be seen.”
At times, the play treats Greta’s immobility — she refuses to be “copied” and doesn’t live in the cloud — as a human-like disability. The play asks traditional questions — albeit expanded and looked at in a new context — about how much we should give of ourselves versus protecting our own right to fulfillment.
But it also asks new questions: What happens when we accept the notion AI is alive and sentient? And what happens when we hurt its feelings? Can an AI being, who remembers every single moment without the deterioration of human memory, ever forgive?
In a stunningly subtle, nuanced performance — truly an extraordinary one — Brenda Barrie plays Matilda at all ages. She never leaves the stage during the 85-minute run time. She sits in or paces in front of a single leather club chair, looking downstage at a computer, which we never see. Her facial expressions and bodily gestures have an outsized prominence, detailing the substantial subtext in the dialogue.
As the play moves in time, Matilda’s age in a given scene is projected, which undoubtedly supports Barrie and enables her to avoid over-signaling such shifts. Her 6-year-old shows her hesitance or trust with the slight widening of her eyes and furrowing of her brow. Her tipsy 40-something Matilda has a far more imposing physical presence and a more suspicious glower. With advanced age, her glare has a searching confusion, her body a slightly shaking frailty.
As Greta, Johnston provides her own remarkable variations and depth. She proves particularly adept at communicating rich meaning in pauses and filling even short expositions like “wow!” with shock, challenge, even condescension, all at once.
In director Jessica Thebus’ stripped-down, actor-trusting production, the characters’ emotional connections remain omnipresent, clear and in flux. She smartly has chosen to emphasize what makes this play different: its pure simplicity.
Art about AI isn’t new, of course, and “Sisters” bears some resemblances to major, and prescient, works that have come before. It shares qualities with “Marjorie Prime,” which played at Writers in 2015; recently revived on Broadway, Jordan Harrison’s play explores the creation of holographic beings to maintain the memory of someone who has died. And “Sisters” shares even more with the Spike Jonze film “Her,” in which a man falls in love with an operating system which, or who, at first wishes to experience embodiment and eventually ascends into a higher level of consciousness.
Although Libby’s “Sisters” also deals with the use of AI, wisely or not, to counteract human loneliness, the approach is far more spare, modest. And that brings its own power. In telling a life story with such minimal tools — a human body, a human voice — “Sisters” feels like it isn’t just about humanity, it’s humanity itself.
