The nanny robot was played by an actual fucking robot. As the audience clapped, I leaned over and showed the program note to Ana and her jaw dropped: “Are you serious?” The way the actress had moved, the way she had spoken, her lips, her eyes — how could she not be human? That night, we stayed up late talking about the play in the pitch dark of her bedroom, lying side by side in bed. We talked about how if “liveness” was the charge we felt from events unfolding in real time, did liveness require at least one sentient performer and one sentient audience member? Could a play entirely performed by robots convey that same live charge? Was sentience a kind of prerequisite for our emotional investment in a performer? And how much? Was there a tipping point, from disengagement with an inanimate object to empathetic connection? Or even if Nari 2 had been less convincingly human, would I have felt as engaged? And to what extent could a robot “perform” if it did not have conscious agency?

At one point I noticed Ana was no longer chiming in. I looked over at her in the dark and she murmured: “I’m tired, yo.”

“Yeah.”

“Goodnight, babe.”

As I lay there, I thought about your work. About your belief in an automated future. One in which back-breaking labour, complicated surgeries, dangerous search-and-rescue operations, and all manner of industry and service would be conducted by androids. But also the hard line you drew between beings and non-beings and our susceptibility to confusing the two. What would you have made of the play’s love story? You probably would have seen it as a metaphor for a broader symptom. Our collective desire to see ourselves in the things we ourselves created. Or perhaps you would have just laughed and said: “Classic men. Falling in love with the thing that serves and doesn’t challenge them.” Yes, most likely you would have said something along those lines.

The show lingered with me over the following week. Less the play itself but the presence of Nari 2 within it and the questions that it provoked. Koichi Asai was the company’s founder, lead playwright, and director. In his photo on the company’s website, he sported a kind of middle-aged architect’s look: clear-frame spectacles, black turtleneck, grey goatee. His bio said he had studied robotics in university and worked for four years as a “sentience consultant” at Honda’s Yorii Factory, forty minutes north of Tokyo, before leaving to study theatre in Paris.