In We Are Your Robots, Ethan Lipton Duets With a Roomba

When composer Ethan Lipton is inspired to write a musical, it’s usually for a very particular reason: “I often like to start with what I call a dumb idea,” he says, deadpan. “It's like an idea where it sounds really hard to make it good and really easy to make it bad.”

Most of the time, the results aren't bad. In fact, many times, the musical in question turns out quite irreverent and off-kilter, but also illuminative and darkly funny. His breakout show No Place to Go was about a worker whose company outsources to Mars. And Lipton’s Tumacho was set in an Old Western town haunted by a killer ghost, and featured sock puppets (and starred Phillipa Soo). He’s currently at work on two musicals: We Are Your Robots, now running Off-Broadway at Theatre for a New Audience (in a coproduction with Rattlestick Theater) through December 8, and a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth—which will play the Public Theater in fall 2025.

“Doing make believe with adults is fucking amazing,” says Lipton with a smile. “I wish everybody in the world could have the opportunity to do it. It really is grounding and beautiful and fun.”

And when you think of robots or a Thornton Wilder play, those things do seem serious. But Lipton has a particular gift for infusing profound themes with a sense of play. In We Are Your Robots, the audience is greeted by tiny vintage robot toys all over the theatre, and a giant retro robot head. But these are not the Terminator robots that want to kill humanity; they’re the friendly neighborhood beep-boop variety (or like the Helperbots currently on Broadway in Maybe Happy Ending). And none of them can be more friendly than Lipton himself, who plays a robot in the show, alongside a trio of musicians who are also robots. They’re a robot band, and they’re here to demonstrate how robots can help humanity. The only question they have, as they sing in the opening number, is “What do you want?”

Which is actually not an easy question to answer.

Vito Dieterle, Ian Riggs, Ethan Lipton, and Eben Levy in *We Are Your Robots* Han Jie Chow

The show was Lipton’s pandemic project, after his Tumacho, which got glowing reviews, was forced to close early due to the pandemic. Around that same time, he became fascinated with the growth of artificial intelligence—he found himself reading and listening to interviews with around 100 scientists and philosophers about A.I.

“I originally thought that the machines were just going to be really fun to make fun of, and easy to make fun of—they're such an obvious villain,” Lipton explains. But the more he researched, he realized that the machines weren’t the issue—it was the people programming them. “Machines are not the villain. Machines are a lot of problems, but machines are a reflection of who we are. And machines, in that sense and in the show, are an opportunity for us to look at who we are and what we're doing. And they may end up doing nefarious things, but not without us telling them to do it.”

And, in a rarity for a theatrical piece, the more Lipton worked on We Are Your Robots, the more real life mirrored what was happening in the show. What was just a theory when Lipton first began research has now become a reality, with the explosive growth in the last year of generative A.I. Though Lipton’s initial impulse remains. To him, even something like ChatGPT, it doesn’t exist without people inputting their ideas and their desires into it. It’s not the robots that can potentially replace humans—it’s the humans who want to use robots to replace humans. “They're just using the tools that we already use to create inequality, bias, all of these things that are problematic in our own world,” Lipton says.

That all sounds like a downer, but rest assured: We Are Your Robots is delightful, and also a perceptive look at humanity—our foibles, but also, our capacity to grow. As Lipton says in the show, lightly, “Screwing up is how you become a better human.”

And in one memorable sequence, Lipton sings with a Roomba, which is arguably a robot (as this writer’s mother remarks of her Roomba, “It’s as good as a human”). Or as Lipton dryly says, “The Roomba studied at NYU, got a graduate degree in acting at NYU. He’s going to get his Equity card.” How does a Roomba sing? Well, in code, and with some backstage assist. The Roomba, whose name is Grandpa Morrie, was created by Props Supervisor Jon Knust and is operated nightly by a stagehand.

Besides a memorable musical moment, the Roomba also enables the audience to relate on a human level to robots—after all, that little robo-vacuum is so gosh-darn cute.

“[One night], when Grandpa Morrie stopped working [in the show], a woman in the audience called out, ‘Don't do this to me!’ She was, like, so invested in this imaginary thing,” marvels Lipton. It’s a reflection of what’s inherently good about humanity—what Lipton praises in the show: our ability for empathy, so much so that we can imbue objects with consciousness, to personify things like puppets or pets or Roombas. And it's even more magical when it happens in real time in a theatre: “I think it's consciousness expanding, whatever that the disbelief that theatre asks, is consciousness expanding in a way that no other art form is.”

Ian Riggs in *We Are Your Robots* Hollis King

After Lipton finishes We Are Your Robots, he’ll go straight into his Skin of Our Teeth adaptation, which has been renamed The Seat of Our Pants. Similar to Robots, Teeth is also a play about “existential issues.” Lipton has the honor of being the rare composer given the permission to adapt the play—the Thornton Wilder estate pulled a Kander and Ebb adaptation from public performance. Lipton says he was given the permission from Tappan Wilder, Thornton’s nephew, to adapt Skin of Our Teeth a decade ago.

“He went and saw my play, Red-Handed Otter, at a storefront theatre in Chicago,” says Lipton. He can’t be sure why he was allowed to adapt Skin of Our Teeth, but Lipton does feel an affinity with Wilder. “Thornton also likes to look at things from a very far distance, like I do with some of my things. And to sort of speak about what it is to be human in a playful way. So I would like to think that the match is good. When I started working on the show, I felt very respectful and very reverent, and then I pretty quickly realized I had to be respectful but irreverent in the way that I treated it.”

What does that mean? Lipton doesn't want to spoil things, though he says he has made cuts to the text to make way for the songs (of which there are 20 at the moment). And he promises there will still be dinosaurs and mammoths, and they might even be singing. But in a play about the end of the world, Lipton wants to focus on the humans.

“It’s such a beautiful play, and I've really adapted it to try to be human centric,” he explains. “Sometimes that play, it is wackadoodle, and it can go toward the cartoon. And I love cartoons, so I don't have any judgment about that; I like those versions of the piece. But what I really responded to was the human people in these circumstances. And my inclination is always sort of more toward the deadpan, to take the funny things very, very seriously.”

And in a time when the news can lead anyone into an existential spiral, Lipton is finding comfort in making art—especially art that makes people laugh, as well as feel: "That might be one of the best things we have to give the world. We're going to have to keep being playful, even when things seem so deadly serious."