What happens when education, the arts and AI converge?
At Saginaw Valley State University, the result is a bold reimagining of “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)” — the 1920 Czech play that gave the world the word robot.
Next week, SVSU’s theatre program, under the direction of associate professor of theatre Tommy Wedge, will stage a contemporary musical adaptation of Karel Čapek’s science fiction classic.
In R.U.R., a scientist mass-produces human-like machines that eventually rebel, raising questions about ethics, labor and technology that are becoming increasingly important today at a seemingly exponential rate.
The project sprang from a conversation between the theatre department and Erik Trump, director for the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning at SVSU, and it grew quickly. Using exposition from the play, Wedge and his team collaborated with AI to create the production – plot, dialog, lyrics, music.
According to Wedge, AI is “pretty good at dialogue, terrible at plot.”
“This project flips the usual theatre-world conversation,” explains Wedge. “Instead of banning AI, we’re asking: how can we use it ethically, creatively and collaboratively? In this case, the result is human performance about robots, powered by artificial intelligence."
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) opens Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 7:30 p.m. at SVSU’s Malcolm Field Theatre for the Performing Arts.
The performance is free and open to the public.
Oct 08, 2025
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