Having It All, Except for Humanity ‘Uncanny Valley,’ a Jaunt Into the Future
Laura Collins-HughesOctober 16, 2014: He who dies with the most toys wins, or so they say. But what’s the point of having all those playthings if death is going to rip you from them anyway? In Thomas Gibbons’s futuristic two-hander Uncanny Valley, presented by the Contemporary American Theater Festival at 59E59 Theaters, a very wealthy man named Julian hasn’t quite found immortality, but he has bought a means to forestall his demise for at least a couple of centuries. With pancreatic cancer about to kill him, Julian plans to download the contents of his mind into an artificial human that carries his DNA and looks just as he did at 34, more than half a lifetime ago. The machine will assume his identity and his existence. “I haven’t had enough,” Julian tells Claire, a neuroscientist who has spent her career working on artificial consciousness. “This world, this life! I can’t even imagine having my fill.”
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