Play a Day: Hey Siri

Dr. Mary E. Weems

For Sunday, I read Hey Siri by Mary Weems and posted at New Play Exchange.

We live in the future. Science fiction has long consisted of machines that we could speak to, like they were other people. B-movie robots, for example. HAL was a computer, whose disembodied voice was created to be calming to the listener.

And now many of us have phones that are also disembodied voices that have been programmed to respond as though they are other people. Alexa. Siri. Those are the two we all know by name, I guess.

Dr. Mary Weems is a poet and an author and a professor and another one of Cleveland’s great writers. This piece was composed a few years ago, and it is an unintentional COVID play, the story of three individuals, closed off from the world, who each have a close relationship with the iPhone. They are each lost souls, an Iraq War vet, the adult child of a heroin addict, and a woman with a strong attachment to dolls.

It is also about Siri herself, as an actor, visible, on stage, plays this artificial intelligence. She acts as therapist to each of them, sometimes a dispassionate provider of information - which can be taken as advice - other times an apparent mind-reader, able to console the human to whom she is speaking.

The question is, are these troubled individuals using Siri for guidance? Or are they healing themselves? The need for connection runs strong throughout, some are able to move beyond their lonely confines, for others it is too late.

Who should I read tomorrow?