Degrees of Freedom Update 7: Happy Ending Unlikely

Where You Belong

Who portrays robots on stage, and does their race matter? Debates over this question have been raging for the past month, as Filipino-American Darren Criss prepares to leave his role (or does he?) as helperbot Oliver in the Broadway production of South Korean musical hit Maybe Happy Ending (if you haven’t listened to the soundtrack, do so now!), with White actor Andrew Barth Feldman stepping in to fill his role. When actors across the AAPI community raised concerns about this recasting, Maybe Happy Ending creators Hue Park and Will Aaronson responded by writing “With Maybe Happy Ending, we wanted to write a show in which every role could be played by an Asian performer, but without the intention that the robot roles always would be” — a claim that seems to cast robots as raceless. 

Yet robots have always been racialized — and within South Korea, the ways robots have been racialized holds eerie parallels to the ways that Maybe Happy Ending has been cast. These parallels are clearest in the case of the Engkey robot: a social robot deployed into English classrooms in South Korea, whose deployment has been analyzed by scholar Anna Romina Guevarra . While children were told that Engkey (a robot sporting a screen showing an animated White Woman’s face) was autonomous, it was, in fact, remotely controlled, predominantly by Filipina women, whose facial expressions were mapped onto the animated White face, erasing their identities and labor in the process.

So, far from being “raceless”, these Korean robots were explicitly racialized as White, in order to leverage local stereotypes that attractive young White women were the “correct” instructors of English — a stereotype originating from the history of American imperialism in Korea. And at the same time, those actually laboring to control these robots, and who were best suited to perform English Language education, were Filipina women — a labor pattern similarly originating from the history of American imperialism in the Philippines. 

In the case of Maybe Happy Ending, the replacement of Filipino actor Criss with White actor Feldman, in a role originally held by Korean actors, directly parallels the very real ways that robots are racialized in Korea.

This is critically important because (as I describe in Degrees of Freedom) the way we think about robots today —what they are, what they look like, and whose labor they replace — has been historically shaped by the racialization of those cast as robots on the American stage. 

The very first robots in literature were inspired in part by minstrel characters like Zip Coon — roles played by White American men dressed in Blackface in order to caricature Black Americans. As literary scholar Taylor Evans has argued, the first American robot patent (the 1868 Steam Man of Dederick and Grass) was likely designed in the image of Zip Coon. This image of the Black Mechanical Man (as shown on the cover of Degrees of Freedom, below) was so potent that it inspired American author Edward Ellis to write the first robot story, The Steam Man of the Prairies, in which a Black mechanical man carrying a young white boy westward to wreak violence on native Americans — a vision for how White men would maintain power with the end of slavery. The Steam Man of the Prairies itself spawned one of the first major science fiction movements.

This depiction of mechanical replacements for Black slaves ultimately led back to the theater, with Czech playwright Karel Capek’s 1920 Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.): a play that gave the word robot (meaning slave or forced laborer) to the synthetic robotic slaves of the popular science fiction novels they built on. Capek’s works were stridently anti-fascist and anti-racist, critiquing lynching and anti-micegentation laws; and R.U.R. is no different, featuring abolitionist characters and explicitly naming its robot characters as slaves. Yet due to its staging in Hradec Králové, those portraying Capek’s robots were White: a casting choice that was maintained when R.U.R. was subsequently staged at New York’s Garrick Theatre in 1922, and when R.U.R. was ultimately broadcast in 1938 on the BBC, making it the first piece of science fiction to be broadcast on TV.

The casting of these robotic slaves as White fundamentally shaped the evolution of robotics in American science fiction and Engineering, with robots taking on a curious racialization: White in appearance and behavior, yet maintaining their original envisioned purpose as replacements for black slaves. As a result, Isaac Asimov’s robots display White-coded behaviors outwardly (e.g., singing H.M.S. Pinafore) while having their behaviors constrained by, in Asimov’s words, “good healthy slave complexes”. This depiction by Asimov then shaped how robots were conceptualized in Engineering. When “Father of Robotics” and Asimov superfan Joseph Engelberger was asked what his factory robots were for, he stated “since we can't have slaves or kick around black people anymore, the robot serves that purpose”.

So, due in part to the racialized casting choices of Minstrel show organizers, of Capek, and of Broadway producers, Robots have come to be consistently racialized today in a way that allows engineers and authors alike to tell stories of White men in a White future where White robots have erased the need for the labor of people of color. It is disappointing — but unsurprising — that Broadway producers continue to repeat these patterns 100 years later.