Review: Machine Learning, a Reality Show Masquerading as an Experiment

A lesbian couple, Willa (Michele Selene Ang) and Lucia (Emma Ramos), have arrived at a research facility, ostensibly to help train robotic companions, those long-promised byproducts of the AI revolution that can actually do useful things in the physical world. What they don’t realize is that they will be sharing this space with a straight couple, Charlie (Douglas Smith) and Georgia (Delaney Rowe) … that is, until they walk in on their new roommates masturbating.

Volatile personalities in a confined environment—it’s not the next season of Big Brother, but Kate Vozella Machine Learning, now making its world premiere with Little Engine Theater at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a public-access television studio, which set designer Tyler Herald has semi-convincingly turned into a bland human terrarium.

“It looks like an Ikea showroom,” remarks Willa, perfectly capturing the vibe. We can instantly tell she and Lucia are in a bad place. Willa doesn’t like how stringent the rules of the facility are. Lucia reminds her that they really need the money. Plus, the fridge is fully stocked with booze (our first clue that this exercise isn’t really about training robots).

Georgia and Charlie have a similar scene in which we are introduced to them as a dysfunctional couple, with Georgia matter-of-factly diminishing Charlie’s career as an artist by comparing him to Jeff, the art world superstar he assists. “Well, he does it for a living,” she cooly remarks, slicing his balls off with a sigh.

All Joan Crawford eyebrows and mean scary girlfriend energy, Rowe delivers the standout performance in Machine Learning, but I suspect that would be true of anyone in the role. Georgia is the primary antagonist of this 90-minute drama, a psychologist who has diagnosed herself as a sociopath and seems to delight in setting up emotional dominos just to knock them down. She’s Edmund in a Lululemon headband. We can thank her entirely for the plot, predictable though it may be.

“I’ve never loved a single person in my life besides myself,” she calmly admits to the group, in a way that made me suspect the playwright has a Georgia in her life, and this script is an exercise in psychological purgation. Although, a more charitable interpretation would be that inviting AI into your life is a little bit like getting in bed with a sociopath.

Little Engine is the young company behind last year’s The Wasp, about an intense woman who hires her high school bully to murder her husband. While Machine Learning is not nearly as fascinating as that unsettling little play, it does give me a clear sense of the stories that make Little Engine chug. All aboard the crazy lady limited.

Under the steady if unspectacular direction of Colm Summers, the three other actors deliver perfectly fine performances. Ramos easily conveys Lucia’s sassy, writerly curiosity. Ang is credibly fragile as the anxious, affection-starved Willa. And Smith turns in a mildly heartbreaking performance of a little brother who, early in his life, learned to interpret bullying as love. Of course, as a psychologist, Georgia clocked this long before he did.

Karen Boyer’s costumes, which exist on the coral to burnt-orange spectrum and feature little rune-like triangles, reinforce the laboratory-cult vibe. Christopher Wong’s lighting is oppressively clinical. Sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe keeps us thinking about the friendly surveillance software into which Americans now regularly feed their most sensitive data, with a sycophantic voiceover that answers the characters’ questions and attempts to fulfill their needs. He also underscores the scene transitions with a kind of electronic tribal drumming, telling the story of high-tech human aspirations when we are still, from an evolutionary standpoint, the same species as cavemen.

Concluding with an unearned metatheatrical gesture, Machine Learning feels like a not particularly clever riff on Sartre’s No Exit. Hell is indeed other people, and we consent to the damnation.