Heddatron: A Play with Robots

Heddatron is a one-act of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler with a mixed cast of humans and robots. Here’s a snippet from a review:

Much is forgiven when someone — or something — is cute. That goes for “Heddatron,” an amusing, if arch, deconstruction of “Hedda Gabler” by the avant-garde company known as Les Freres Corbusier. Five of the cutest robots that ever rolled off an engineering ramp interact smartly with human actors in this cheeky sendup of Ibsen and the precepts of the well-made play.

I saw a piece about Heddatron on the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet (yes, Natasha Stillwell and her accent float my boat). My Windows Media Player is totally b0rked, but it looks like you can watch it on this page. It looked pretty absurd to me–a gimmick to be sure.

A quick footnote: If you check out Heddatron’s (stupid) splash page, you’ll see a robot which looks a heck of a lot like the Geeky Traveller hitchhiking android. I checked with GT designer Mark Yuasa, and he confirmed that he drew the robot based on this stock photography, which the Heddatron folks have also used. Mark subsequently acquired his very own robot, which you see in the above photo.