The Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts and the College of Engineering recently came together to make magic on stage, combining forces to build a fully functioning animatronic robot that served as a cast member in the department’s production of “After the Blast.”
The play, written by Zoe Kazan and directed by Kevin McClatchy, an associate professor at Ohio State, tells the story of a couple – Anna and Oliver, played by senior Hailee Franklin and junior Milkias Damenu – who attempt to have a child in a post-apocalyptic world in where humanity has been forced underground. Anna, however, faces challenges with her mental health, preventing them from being approved to have a child.
To help improve Anna’s mental health, Oliver brings home a helper robot. It is at this point that the audience is introduced to Arthur, the result of nearly a year of collaboration between the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering.
“The first time I saw it was right at the start of the semester,” said junior Colin Barberic, who voiced Arthur offstage in the play. “In August, we had a meeting and they showed a picture of it. It's kind of cute, like Wall-E. We did not have the robot until a couple days into tech rehearsal, which is the last thing that happens before the show. It was like, 'It's got a head that can move and it can drive around.' It was such a magical moment.”
Controlled offstage with a video game controller, Arthur is capable of emoting, driving around the stage, turning his head, moving his arms up and down – including to “bow” during curtain call – and even playing fetch during several scenes.
Conversations about building a fully animatronic robot for “After the Blast” began nearly a year ago, with the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts enlisting the help of students in Ohio State’s Underwater Robotics Team and Theme Park Engineering Group to bring this project to fruition. The final development team included undergraduates Jamison Butz, Matthew Fisher, Aaron Ligator, Aubrey Nelson and Connor Rittenhouse, as well as graduate students Evan Lane, Megan Wells and Gabe Willenberg, all of whom played a role in Arthur’s debut on the big stage.
"We're Ohio State. We're going to build a real robot." - Associate professor Kevin McClatchy
While other productions of the play have used animatronics, none have created a robot as in-depth or with as many capabilities as Arthur. McClatchy called it an “easy decision” to take on this challenge.
“This kind of collaboration is why we do this,” he said. “We want to create art that is impactful but also brings a community of people together. We have these amazing people like Matthew and Gabe and Audrey and everybody else who was involved in creating this robot. Most other productions of this play use puppets, a sort of puppet-robot. We just said, 'You know what? We're Ohio State. We're going to build a real robot.'”
It presented a unique opportunity for the actors and actresses who shared the stage. Franklin’s character Anna spends a significant portion of the show on stage with just Arthur, and she tries to treat the robot as she would any other character in a play.
“I talked to the robot like it's a character,” she said. “I don't think it serves anything for it to be a distinction, because in the show, the bulk of it is Anna falling in love with this robot. I have to ground my reality and her reality in that way.
“I'm grateful for the opportunity because I love acting. It has so many unique acting challenges,” Franklin added. “To lead a show for the first time and have it be pretty challenging because there's no one up there to save you, you have to be on it a little bit more.”
But introducing a variable such as a robot to live theater also has the potential to complicate things. Engineering student Matthew Fisher was in charge of operating Arthur during the play, remotely controlling him just offstage and also addressing any mechanical issues, with countless contingencies in place to ensure the play went on as planned.
“It was really interesting commentary,” McClatchy said. “The cast, and Matthew and Gabe, did a phenomenal job of just improvising and adjusting, but what it ended up being was this comment on the sort of tenuous relationship with technology and the agility of technology, and what are the limits of technology. That was unintended, but it was really cool.”
But other than a brief hiccup on opening night in which Barberic had to come out and help after the robot was unable to move, Arthur mostly hit his marks during the show’s two-week run. Crowds in attendance at the Proscenium Theatre on Ohio State’s Columbus campus always left in awe of the performance, with particular applause for Arthur taking his mechanical bow at the end of the evening.
“It's always fun to hear an audience reaction when he first lights up, and then he's moving and driving and doing all these things, and watching as they interact with him,” Fisher said. “It's been a very rewarding process to see something that is so complicated being done on the stage and creating something that's so unique.”