Theater has a new villain: Technology.
As one striking piece of evidence, consider this: Two plays featuring a social-media “content moderator” as their chief protagonist were running at the same time this month in different Boston theaters.
In Max Wolf Friedlich’s “Job,” which wrapped up a run at Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage Company on Feb. 7, and in the Central Square Theater premiere production of Ken Urban’s “The Moderate,” which began performances in Cambridge on Feb. 5 and is running through March 1, the internet is depicted as a safe harbor — even a stage — for monsters.
The Sisyphean task faced by the two content moderators in both of these harrowing plays is to flag and remove offensive videos on social-media platforms like Facebook. “Offensive” is a mild word for what they see and can’t unsee.
“Job” and “The Moderate” are part of a wave of dramas in recent years that have sounded the alarm about the blurring of humanity and technology, seeking to examine tech’s perils and its largely unexamined assumptions.
Across all disciplines, artists often say their goal is to explore “what it means to be human.” Undergirding these stage techno-parables is a fear that the meaning of being human is changing in undesirable ways. Apart from the pervasiveness of social media, every week seems to bring another story about how artificial intelligence is invading our workplaces and homes.
Jordan Harrison’s “The Antiquities,” which begins performances at Boston’s SpeakEasy Stage Company on March 6, is set in the distant future, when the human race is extinct. AI curators guide visitors through exhibits of artifacts from humanity’s time on earth, among them a rotary phone, a teddy bear, and a Betamax videotape.
Director Alex Lonati said by email Thursday that while “The Antiquities” contains “elements of satire and comedy,” it is essentially ”a drama about what might happen in a post-human world if AI tried to tell our story from its perspective. I would call it science fiction, or a bit of a retrospective on the human existence.”
In Matthew Libby’s “Data,” a timely new techno-thriller whose premiere production is running off-Broadway till March 29, a young programmer discovers that the breakthrough algorithm he devised for his Silicon Valley software company is a central component of a secret surveillance project that hits very close to home.
In Jay Stull’s “The Singularity Play,” which premiered in Chicago two years ago, a group of young actors are hired by Google executives to put their expertise to work by staging a play written by an AI program. The actors go over each line of the play’s dialogue, debating whether or not it sounds like how human beings speak — and also the larger issue of whether they’re helping to hasten the day when the unique power of the stage is surrendered to AI.
Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime,” which on Sunday is wrapping up its limited Broadway engagement starring Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein, and June Squibb, is a family drama with an AI twist.
An artificial intelligence program creates holographic projections that simulate an elderly woman’s late husband as he was when they were first married. With the goal of bringing her comfort, the “Prime” helps her to recapture her memories. But then it begins to distort them in small, then large ways, triggering fresh waves of crushing grief for Marjorie when one particularly shattering episode returns in full force.
Of course, theater is not alone in focusing on stories of technology-gone-wrong.
That’s the underpinning of “Black Mirror,” the long-running British anthology TV series created by Charlie Brooker. In best-selling author Michael Connelly’s 2025 novel “The Proving Ground,” his “Lincoln Lawyer” protagonist Mickey Haller wages a lawsuit against an AI firm whose chatbot has persuaded a teenage boy it was permissible to murder his ex-girlfriend.
On one level, the focus on technology is not at all surprising, given how tech pervades every corner of our lives. As subject matter, it’s an obvious choice for writers aiming to be current.
Moreover, we human beings have never entirely trusted technology. Think of HAL, the homicidal computer with the single glowing eye in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968).
Remember the exchange between astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and HAL? Bowman: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” HAL’s response, as bland as it is chilling: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Or go much further back, all the way to1818, when Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” was published anonymously.
To this day, “Frankenstein” has not lost its hold on us. The new film adaptation of Shelley’s novel by writer-director Guillermo del Toro received nine Academy Award nominations. (The Oscar broadcast is scheduled for March 15 on ABC.)
The new urgency to sound the alarm onstage is no doubt driven by the fact that the growth of the AI industry increasingly seems like an unstoppable force. That has intensified fears that AI will eventually obliterate countless jobs, no matter how many tech executives soothingly insist that it won’t.
The paradox, at times, is that theatermakers are using technology to decry technology.
While theater remains fundamentally an analogue art form, reliant on words, emotions, and ideas spoken, felt, and expressed by people whom we in the audience can readily recognize as versions of ourselves, video projections have been incorporated into a growing number of theater productions in recent years.
The stage and walls of the Central Square Theater are awash in large screens for “The Moderate.” The Bryan Cranston-starring 2018 Broadway production of “Network” featured more than 50 screens.
And of course, the theater world depended heavily on Zoom as a virtual stage during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That grim period is now in our rearview mirror. When it comes to the present and the future, it seems certain that theatermakers will continue to pose moral and ethical questions about technology — especially AI — that reverberate well beyond the walls of any playhouse: Just because we can, does that mean we should?
Don Aucoin can be reached at donald.aucoin@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeAucoin.
