Pho meets AI in new SF Playhouse show
Play follows an eatery trying to stop gentrification
How do we know that the world we're living in is real? It's a question that philosophers have grappled with for centuries, and one that has gained more cultural currency in the age of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
It's also the question at the heart of the play “My Home on the Moon” by Hmong-Vietnamese American playwright Minna Lee, now making its world premiere at San Francisco Playhouse.
“I got the idea for the play originally in a roller rink called Southgate Roller Rink in Seattle, where I grew up,” says Lee, who uses gender neutral pronouns. “This was in 2019. I was at the time witnessing a lot of gentrification happening around the city, and I was sort of in disbelief that we could still have a roller rink that everyone could still skate around in. I also was thinking about how I saw a lot of regulars there, and the music was always the same every night. And I began wondering, what if this was a simulation? What if it was already gone, and the best way that people could get civilians to get used to change was putting them in a simulation? That way we wouldn't act up against corporations and all that. What if that was the way they kept us happy and away from obstructing their plans?”
As Lee started to formulate the play, the virtual roller rink of their initial idea gradually morphed into a roller diner and finally into a pho restaurant.
“It's a sci-fi adventure comedy about a Vietnamese restaurant that is struggling against gentrification,” Lee says. The restaurant receives a mysterious grant from a tech company promising to make their wildest business dreams come true, but there's a hidden catch that raises profound questions about the nature of reality. “I've been pitching it as a pho restaurant in the Matrix,” Lee adds.
When director Mei Ann Teo first read an early draft of the play, “I could tell both the striking ambition of grappling with these themes and the comedic delight of how Minna envisions the world, coupled with no hesitation in looking at darkness in the face,” says Teo, who also uses they/them pronouns. “I just thought, oh my goodness, you're doing a lot in this that really appeals to me and feels impossible at the same time. OK, I'm on board. I don't know how to do this. Let's go!”
“My Home on the Moon” toys a lot with the nature of reality, with virtual characters and settings changing in a moment.
“You're in the restaurant. It needs to feel real, not only to the characters, but to us, because we're living alongside those characters,” Teo says. “And then in the artificial space of the theater, how can it feel real in different ways? When you're creating a world that needs to feel really real and that is also a simulation, there's a lot of how we perceive reality that needs to be then challenged. It's already a journey to say, okay, we need to make people believe that this is actually a kitchen. But then how do we also add in the layers of that it's also not, but it is?”
This is the first full stage production of one of Lee's plays. Another play, “One Horse Town,” was supposed to premiere at Seattle's Annex Theatre in the spring of 2020, but after the pandemic shutdown it was converted into an audio play.
“The play actually was about a pandemic,” Lee notes. “I wrote that play literally three months before lockdown began, but it was about a respiratory pandemic and a group of cowboys surviving an apocalypse. And then it got canceled by the real pandemic. There's a saying that sometimes playwrights are oracles in a way.”
That axiom proved equally true for “My Home on the Moon.”
“In 2021, when I finished the first draft, the conversations about AI were not anywhere near where they are now,” Lee says. “That has escalated in ways that I couldn't have predicted. I was using Octavia Butler's method of sci-fi where she says, you take an issue and you think about it 50 or 500 years in the future, but I underestimated. It's been three years, and we're already entering some scary times with AI.”
Computer scientists have been working on artificial intelligence for decades, and it's been the subject of speculative fiction for longer still. But recent advances in AI have caused a flurry of headlines, “deepfakes” and lawsuits in the last couple of years.
In the middle of this play's run at SF Playhouse, a very different play exploring the implications of AI opens just a couple blocks away at American Conservatory Theatre, “Big Data” by Kate Attwell. In fact, scenic designer Tanya Orellana is working on both shows. “It's like our cousin,” Lee says with a laugh.
“It's a conversation that's happening, and I think it's here to stay,” Lee adds. “It's a conversation we all need to have about just how to use AI and how it exists in our lives.”