The premise of Don’t Save Me is so thought-provoking that it almost makes redundant the actual writing or production of the play.
Jade (Holly Mazzola) is dying. Her husband Pat (Ben Itaba) secretly records their conversations, so she can be brought “back to life” by AI.
Does Pat have the right?
Written by Karina Young and directed by Nelson Blake, the focus of the play is primarily, and narrowly, ethical.
But when Jade discovers Pat’s plan, and objects, his response is a flat But you’ll be dead – which doesn’t quite trump all further argument, but feels awfully close to doing so. The dead, after all, don’t have rights. (You can lie about the dead, but you can no longer libel them.) And, with little time left, and that time to be inevitably filled with physical suffering, Jade’s insistence on her rights seems odd, an unacknowledged avoidance strategy as against a justified indignation. (Life perceived solely through the lens of rights is particularly barren. As victims of blind circumstance, which we all ultimately are, rights offer little counsel and even less consolation.)
And, with its sights firmly on ethics, the play sidesteps more interesting ontological issues. Instead of Should we do it? how about Could we do it?
The answer to the second of these questions is not only dependent on technology, but also on what we think it is to be a person. Are we just a collection of relatively consistent words and behaviours? If so, AI is perfectly capable of replicating us. However, vitally aware of our own agency, our freedom and the endless dynamism of being alive, we resist such a reductive vision of personhood
But the experience of love raises a thorny problem. We love particular people. Or, if we’re talking romance, solely one person. Based on what? Their relatively consistent words and behaviours? If that is so, Pat’s reductive AI plan is disturbingly little different from his choice to marry Jade in the first place!
And that’s why a deeper psychological exploration would have been fruitful. We don’t see Pat make the decision to record his wife. He’s already doing it before the play begins. We don’t see him so overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of his wife’s existence, that in the mad hope it might continue, he desperately clutches at straws. Similarly, when Jade discovers Pat’s plan, her response is merely anger. It doesn’t seem to occur to her to seriously consider why her husband might be tempted. She’s too focussed on her supposed rights to openly face the awful, bewildering mystery of ultimate loss. (Even when she asserts she is scared of death, we aren’t shown her fear, only her anger that her husband has failed to recognise her emotions.) For most of the 90 minutes of the play, the characters are remarkably unchanging, altering only in mood rather than outlook – and that’s a pity, because character development is a terrific dramatic tool to explore the moral, philosophical and emotional complexities of any thorny issue.
Indeed, the characters appear to be deliberately infantilised: her sister (Raechyl French) attempts to bribe her way back into Jade’s trust with ice-cream; the married couple’s dream holiday is Disneyland; they build a pillow fort in the loungeroom; and their relationship appears to consist of home cooking, including the baking of cookies, and watching reality TV on the couch. (Admittedly, the last of these could be an invitation to consider authenticity, after all, the play is about AI.)
But why are they such static children?
It functions as a powerful portrait of fear, of debilitating terror before those two most dreadful agents of change: Technology, control of which we’ve lost, and Death, whose measure we never had.
Paul Gilchrist
Don’t Save Me by Karina Young
presented by Puncher’s Chance Co in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Co
at KXT until March 8
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 
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