By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK
The first production of Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s Freshworks season opened to a full house on Friday, October 2nd—a fitting start for a program dedicated to new work in development. Aura, written and directed by Mal MacKenzie, arrives with a quietly urgent premise: a mother creates an AI chatbot modeled on the daughter she feels she has lost—a version of her child who never underwent a gender transition. But her child is very much alive. He has transitioned and goes by Dustin. And he can sense that something is wrong with his mother without yet knowing what she has built in his absence.
MacKenzie’s dramaturgy is confident and well-crafted. The text is tight, thoroughly rehearsed, and sits naturally in the actors’ mouths. The writing earns its emotional weight without resorting to easy villains: Shannon, the mother, played with grounded complexity by Audrey Wells, is neither monstrous nor simply sympathetic. She is a woman in pain, doing something understandable and harmful at the same time—and the play holds both truths without flinching. Em Presley brings genuine presence and charisma to Dustin, navigating the conflict with his mother with real dramatic tension. Sarah Dugan’s performance as Dawn—the AI version of the daughter—is perhaps the evening’s highlight: a stylized, economical physicality and vocal performance, almost mechanical, that makes the uncanny valley visible in the body itself. There are moments, however, when her delivery accelerates past the point of full intelligibility. More broadly, some scenes of heightened dramatic tension produce overlapping dialogue that occasionally obscures the text. Whether this is a directorial choice—privileging atmosphere over clarity—great, if it isn’t, it would benefit from sharper orchestration before the next iteration.
The play’s richest territory is its treatment of grief as process. Freud’s concept of Trauerarbeit—the work of mourning, the slow and painful task of confronting the reality of loss in everyday life—hovers over the entire evening. What we witness is a mother caught between mourning and its refusal. The box of her child’s childhood memories, handled throughout the play, is Trauerarbeit in action: the gradual, tactile reckoning with a past that will not return. The AI, by contrast, is its opposite—a short-circuit in the reality test, a way of keeping the beloved object present, bypassing the labor of loss entirely. The play is wise enough not to condemn this. It simply shows both movements coexisting, neither resolved.
There is also a sharper observation embedded in the drama. In one particular scene, Shannon grows frustrated with the AI after realizing it will only agree with her—no matter what she says, Dawn validates, confirms, reflects back. The circuit of indulgence becomes unbearable. Disagreement, the play quietly insists, is one of the most human things we do, even when it hurts. That insight lands with precision.
The production’s most underdeveloped element is its opening device. While narrating episodes from her child’s childhood, Shannon distributes objects—drawings, memorabilia—to members of the audience, each transfer accompanied by a technological sound, as if an upload were being performed. The implication—that the audience is being cast as the AI—only became legible to me after the play, while reflecting. The fourth wall, once broken at the beginning, is never broken again. The device receives no continuation, no dramaturgical payoff. The experience is also necessarily partial: many audience members, myself included, received nothing. What does it mean to watch a mother upload her memories into an audience that is only partially receiving it? The question is more interesting than the answer the production currently offers—which is to say, the answer is still being written.
The off-stage voice of the AI platform—performed by Marissa Lily—is one of the production’s stronger design choices, deepening both the dramatic action and the unsettling reflection on AI that runs through the evening. The sound design by Ray K. Morgen earns its place. Less settled are the video elements (by Em Presley) that occasionally accompany these audio interventions: images of predominantly white faces, placid smiles, the visual grammar of stock photography. The critical intent is legible—perhaps too legible. The images haven’t yet found a way to surprise, to cut deeper than the critique they illustrate.
This is, finally, Shannon’s play—and there is nothing wrong with that. The trouble is that the dramaturgy occasionally suggests otherwise, positioning Dustin as co-protagonist while granting him the interiority of a supporting character. We see his conflict with his mother clearly; we see less of what he carries alone—his doubts, his fears, his own ambivalence. In a play so attentive to the mother’s inner life, that asymmetry occasionally registers as imbalance rather than choice.
It was only during the post-show discussion that I learned what we saw on Friday was the first act of a longer work. I left the KST Alloy Studio wanting the second—which is, perhaps, the best thing one can feel at the end of a first act. Aura is building toward something that matters: a play about transness, about family, about a technology increasingly and unapologetically infiltrating every layer of our lives. It is also a play about grief, and about the irreducible strangeness of loving someone who is changing. MacKenzie and the team of artists are asking the right questions. The scenic answers, for now, remain productively open—as they should be, at this stage of the work. So, for that matter, does this review.
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose practice moves between criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Reviews
Leave a Reply Cancel reply