Hearts and The Arts in the Age of AI
Coni Koepfinger’s Wilber’s New Wife Explores the Impact of Modern Tech at the ATA
Wilber Weinberg’s wife has left him—but through the miracle of AI, not empty-handed.
In Wilber’s New Wife, the titular New York playwright (Michael Bordwell) is heartbroken when his beloved Candace (Amanda Cannon) divorces him and moves to California to work for the forward-thinking Tech Mates company. There, she creates Goldie (Tess Cameron), an AI-powered “hybrid” woman, and sends her to Wilber to be his specially programmed companion and creative partner. In fact, she is already in his bed when the play begins, to his shock and alarm.
The idea of an ex-partner programming a new AI creation to be what she can’t be for her former love is a clever, disturbing, and very timely one. Goldie’s beauty, charm, and intellect are off the charts, but one can’t ignore the brutal truth—that she is still a fabrication, a parody of a human being whose feelings and artistic “depth” were created with a few keystrokes. It’s something that hits powerfully home in an age where we can get our favorite singers and actors to do whatever we want through Deep Fakes, De-Aging, and Voice Recreation. (And we can even create fake companions that will tell us what we want to hear, so Candace is checking all the boxes here.)
Goldie is tailor-made for Wilber in every way, but ironically Wilber comes to realize that she is better suited for his friend and director, Ben (Alan Hasnas), who quickly becomes smitten with the hybrid. This twist is a devastating one for anyone familiar with unrequited love—Wilber can’t even hang on to the love of an artificial being specifically created for him!
But the show must go on, and Goldie joins Wilber and Ben in working on their new play. When they get stuck, she is pressed into action, and rewrites the script in a matter of seconds—her “thoughts” attached directly to the whirring printer in the rehearsal room. It’s a funny but chilling representation of how we’re beginning to surrender our creative choices to the likes of ChatGPT.
In an intensely funny and thought-provoking sequence, Wilber’s actors (Mady Huston and Riyadh Rollins) do different versions of Wilber’s play in the style of famous playwrights. Just like ChatGPT, Goldie is programmed to simply mimic the writing of the greats by scanning through their works and coming up with something “new”—but soulless. Despite Candace’s claims that Goldie “has” a soul, the hollow falseness of the situation is palpable.
Candace eventually returns to see the results of her experiment, and eventually old-fashioned emotion and genuine feeling are returned to the lives of our characters. But we are still left with the lingering threat of AI, and reminded to hang on to our hearts and our creative spirit for dear life.
Wilber’s New Wife is just what we need right now as we reach a pivotal point in human development. Koepfinger and his charming and talented cast have truly given us something profound to think about as we speed into the 2nd quarter of the 21st century, and an uncertain future—both for the Arts, and for how we live and love.
Wilber’s New Wife is Directed by Ken Coughlin and runs at the American Theater of Actors through Dec. 10.
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