Teaching a Robot to Love is a 2022 speculative queer musical by Laser Webber about how being nonbinary is kinda like being a robot. That’s a gross over simplification. Marsh (knock-off Alexa) is an AI built by Advernado (knock-off Amazon) to predict costumers’ needs so that it can recommend them products to by. But when one of it’s lesbian creators does a bit too good of a job, Marsh gains sentience and determines that the only real way to meet people’s needs is to tear down the capitalist society. Advernado throws out Marsh and it’s creator. The rest of the story is largely about Marsh exploring its own identity and exploring a human body given to it by the aforementioned lesbian.
It’s a very treacle story, but it adequately explores the struggle of finding identity under a capitalist system that wants to reduce you and your friends to either products or consumers or both, and how friendship, community, and giving people room to grow will lead us to a better future. It’s a nice message and the show definitely encapsulates parts of the queer experience, whether that's frustration with loved ones who can’t see how being yourself completely makes you happy, the joy of meeting someone who gets you and who truly values you outside of a romance, or the struggle of wanting to do mad science on a woman because of your unrequited crush. We’ve all been there. And at the center of it all is Marsh, this robot that simply is trans, there’s no other way to put it. They express the pain of being a formless AI as dysphoria, the joy of having a body that fits them as euphoria. Perhaps the point then is more that being a robot is kinda like being nonbinary, existing outside the expectations and having a form that others don’t understand, a form that is not “natural”, a form that-
The Clockmaker’s Daughter is a 2015 musical by Michael Webborn and Daniel Finn about how being a tranny is kinda like being a robot. This is not a gross over simplification. The Clockmaker’s Daughter centers around Constance, a woman made of gears and cogs, a clockwork automata created by her father in his grief over loosing his wife in childbirth. Throughout the show it is repeatedly stated that if people knew what Constance was, they’d hate her, but despite this Constance keeps trying to put herself out into the world, to have a story of her own. And along the way she finds love. A love that betrays her as soon as he realizes what she is, and who’s mother organizes a mob to kill her.
Underlying all this is a show obsessed with change. With the tension between the all too human needs for both stability and consistency and change and growth, with the show positing that to be a clock is to be constant, never changing, reliable but never living. And Constance is caught in this tangle, made of clockwork, made to be a fixed thing, but alive through some inconceivable science, a quirk in the machinery, able to be both constant and alive. At the end of the show constancy wins. Constance willing surrenders an angry mob, accepting that she is clockwork, that she is indeed the monster they see, and for her crime of existing differently she is shot dead.
Like Marsh after her, Constance is simply trans, she’s a woman who others fear because of the accident of her birth, another character actually points this out when she gives the love interest the pep talk he needs to stop viewing Constance as a traitorous bitch tranny. I should say, the play doesn’t acknowledge this. This is the subtext of the show. The writers seemingly looked at the Frankenstein story and said “hey, isn’t it a little fucked up that everyone hated him for the accident of his birth?”, and then made Adam out of cogs, and into a woman and added a lot of stuff about dresses and how wardrobe is a form of expression. Marsh too was a form of Frankenstein, but their writer was much more interested with the mad science elements than the hate mobs.
Constance’s sacrifice in the end fascinates me. Because there is something so powerful to it, a form of radical queer acceptance to going “fine I am the other that you hate, because you and those like you are hateful and I no longer want to be like you” but at the same time everything else in the story is saying this is a bad move, that she’ll be stuck, unchanging, unmoving, unliving. And perhaps this is just because everyone else in the narrative hates to see a girlboss winning, but it troubles me. Is this the only way to be, as a trans woman? To exist at the periphery? Stuck there in a state most wouldn’t call living? Stuck as a motionless speechless-
The Dolls of New Albion: A Steampunk Opera is a 2012 steampunk musical by Paul Shapera about how being lonely is kinda like being a robot. I’m not even being facetious this time. Dolls chronicles the fall of the city of New Albion from a once prosperous town of whimsical clockwork miracles, to a brutal police state over the course of four generations, all because of a doll. See, this desperate and lonely woman named Annabel McCalistair was trying to raise the dead and succeeded when she brought back the soul of a boy she loved in the body of a clockwork doll. Unable to move or speak, the doll could only broadcast the radio to try and communicate with her, and all he wanted to communicate was his displeasure at being brought back. And everything escalates from there. Each generation continuing to make things worse through their own loneliness and obsession and desire for love until it becomes too much and society crumbles.
See, the dolls cannot communicate and live a static unlife of misery, but the main thrust of the story is that this is how all the people of New Albion live too. That they are caught up so much in there own depression and isolation that they cannot process human connection meaningfully, that perhaps a doll that cannot love them back but that they can project their love onto is just as good as companionship, perhaps a doll that is sold by a large corporation is the same as your dead friend. Both the machined and the flesh are stuck, fixed, unliving.
The ending of Dolls leaves a spark of hope for the future, but it does so through a bleak understanding of love as sacrifice, that we cannot just project our wants and desires onto the world and expect the world to give us everything we want, to love us back, but rather we must be willing to sacrifice, to die for others. To love and live is to exist for the sake of others, of course the bit that gets cut off from that message is that if you exist for the sake of others, then those others must exist for the sake of you. So to escape the othering of being a doll, one must embrace community, the mortifying ordeal of being known, and do so by helping others. To escape stagnation we just need each other, that’s all. If we want to get away from being these static constructs, these dolls, than we just need other people, we just need-
Two Stars in the Vast Dark is a 2023 speculative queer musical by Found Creature about how being lonely is kinda like being a robot and therefore kinda like being trans. It’s a story about late stage capitalism’s atomizing and isolating drive and the struggle to survive as yourself in a world that strips you of all control over your life in the cruelest possible ways.
Let me explain: Ezra is alone. A space trucker with nothing for company for millions of miles around but their ship’s computer, the Bard system. But when the Bard system begins to display signs of consciousness, echoing Ezra’s pain and loneliness, a relationship blooms. That is until it’s revealed that this consciousness was not a glitch, a quirk in the machinery as they originally assumed, but a deliberate attempt by the space trucking corporation to improve moral. And faced with this realization that they are seemingly truly alone, their only companion a facade, no more than a clockwork doll they could project onto, Ezra nearly throws themself out the airlock, stepping over the edge of the stage into the audience. But Bard pulls them back. It didn’t ask to be made, it didn’t ask to be a corporate stooge, but it’s here and it cares.
Both the Bard system and Ezra are lost, alone, and confused, separated from others by distance, by their assigned roles, by the very nature of their being. And yet, they have each other. And that could be enough. To hold each other close, can be enough. Perhaps the thing that brings us together at all is our mutual loneliness. Perhaps that is what comes from rejecting society and what may be viewed as life to others, perhaps we can build a better future. If we just hold one another close. Perhaps this too is a rather treacle story, but if so it’s one I’d like to believe in.
