‘The Human Museum’ Puts Humanity on Display (Review)
metroweekly.comConsistent with Rorschach Theatre’s adventurously immersive productions, the company’s latest, The Human Museum by Miyoko Conley, engages audiences in playful conversation with its themes well before the show even begins.Audiences enter through the titular museum, a hallowed institution operated by robots of Earth in a future where humans are extinct.
Created inside the same two-story Connecticut Avenue former retail space where, last fall, Rorschach unleashed Night of the Living Dead Live, the Human Museum passes patrons through galleries filled with artifacts of human existence.Considering this is the work of artificially intelligent bots with only a secondhand concept of what humans were like, the exhibit items have been well chosen.
Doubtless, future minds, be they artificial or alien, may well be fascinated to understand what Twinkies were, and why humans consumed so many of them.
The human fascination with mirrors, though less mysterious, also seems a good call for a cultural footnote that AI would deem museum-worthy.Making the calls for this production, Rorschach co-artistic director Randy Baker stages Miyoko’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi downstairs on the museum’s lower level, in a traverse configuration placing the audience on either side of the action.
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