Just finding your seat at “The Machine” preps you for an exciting experience. And then the show starts . . .
With the audience sitting on all four sides of a stage plopped down the middle of the Park Avenue Armory’s gigantic Drill Hall, you must first figure out if you’re sitting in the east, west, north or south section.
Then you’re funneled through various lines not unlike the ones at an airport security screening—the Armory’s staff is a lot nicer than TSA agents, though.
Eventually, you make your way through steep bleachers perched above the arena like stage. It’s like looking down a mini Madison Square Garden, complete with Jumbotrons above a center ring.
Except the opponents aren’t basketball players or boxers: “The Machine” is about the six 1997 chess matches between grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.
Playwright Matt Charman and director Josie Rourke’s big idea is to frame the historic man versus cybernetics encounter like a sports event—or rather like a sports movie.
Charman goes back and forth between the competition itself and the back story of the two opponents— Kasparov (Hadley Fraser) and Feng Hsiung Hsu (Kenneth Lee), the Taiwan born, Carnegie Mellon–educated scientist who conceived Deep Blue and, in the show, moved the chess pieces on its behalf.
So we see Kasparov as a child prodigy, tutored by his formidable mother (Francesca Annis) and learning from grandmaster and future rival Anatoly Karpov.
Meanwhile, Hsu is a socially clumsy brainiac who dedicates himself to building a machine that can balance the calculation and creativity necessary to chess, and also learn from its mistakes.
The production, which was imported from the Manchester International Festival, certainly is ambitious. Lucy Osborne’s set alone must have cost a bundle, and then there’s the live simulcast of the action —such as it is—on the giant screens.
And yet it’s all stupefyingly boring.
You wish Charman had watched “Bull Durham,” “Rocky” or even the musical “Chess.” He would have learned that with competition, the audience must care about both the people and the stakes. Charman tackles big issues, but the hackneyed, dramatically limp writing isn’t up to the task.
The promotional circus surrounding the event leads to heavy handed humor— mostly from Phil Nichol’s cartoonishly ridiculous commentator. Hsu’s unlikely crush on a blond cheerleader (Antonia Bernath) also lands with a big thud.
Things do pick up toward the end, when Kasparov and Deep Blue are tied with one game left. Charman and Rourke at long last build up some suspense, and we glimpse the show that might have been. With nothing left to lose, would it have killed them to squeeze in “One Night in Bangkok”?