About Binding Prometheus

I want to start actively advocating on behalf of my own work, and the most valuable part of my canon is, without a doubt, Binding Prometheus, the play I have been working on since 2019 and only finished in 2023 as part of my MA. The play itself is an amalgamation of a million different inspirations. On one end, it evokes the Ancient Greek myth-play, deriving its own title from the earliest extant work of Western drama we have, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. On the other end, it borrows significantly from the sci-fi bulwarks from over the years, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. The play could be an episode of Black Mirror, I fear. I don’t know. I’ve only ever seen one episode of Black Mirror.

The play centers Leroy Baxter, a data scientist and expert programmer, grieving the loss of his young son Artie. He labors tirelessly to create what he deems the most valuable technological development in the history of humankind: an AI replica of William Shakespeare that can write, take on new information, and live and breathe as the old Bard of Avon once did. The resulting predictive text, William Shakesbot as he’s known in the play, struggles to find his footing in the modern world. On one end, he wholly believes himself to be the desecrated soul of William Shakespeare himself, and on the other, he knows that he was not meant for the world he has been reborn into. Because he is born a hollow shell with approximations of emotions in the place of emotions, as he discovers the first true emotions of his artificial personhood, it becomes too much for him. He retreats into himself, only to be coaxed out by his very first friend, Alexa Fairweather.

Alexa Fairweather is a playwright and the closest this play ever gets to a self-insert from the author. She is marked by immense fear and anxiety over the future, one where predictive text algorithms such as William Shakesbot may one day replace her. She is happily married, and is trying for a baby with her husband, Trent, to no luck. As the Shakesbot Project develops, she subsumes herself further and further into this fear of obsolescence. Her gripe is simple: She is overwhelmed by the great monolith of the canon, is afraid she is powerless to compete with it, and now, as the greats within that canon can now be resurrected through AI, she fears this is the final nail in her coffin. There is no place for her in a world like that, and she is afraid that if she can ever have a child, that child will be stuck in a confusing, rapidly expanding world that they are just as unfit for.

Being unfit for the world is a major theme in Binding Prometheus, and this rapidly-developing world is a source of powerlessness for all parties involved beyond the three major protagonists. Leroy, despite being a major mover of this world, is just as lost as the rest of the rabble. He, too, is drowning in grief, stuck between the dying old world and the world that could not come to pass. As it turns out, in that grief, William Shakespeare was not the only soul he sought to resurrect. There’s always Artie.

I am very excited to explore this play further with all of you. If you wish to read the full play, don’t hesitate to reach out on Instagram. In the meantime, I will continue to explore the characters that exist in this dramatic world, and the inspirations that feed into it.