In his latest Broadway project, Emmy winner Darren Criss (The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story) and his co-star, Helen J. Shen, play retired, robotic “helperbots” in the near-future love story Maybe Happy Ending. And although it might seem like a challenge to find the emotion in an android, Criss is finding that more he plays with the artifice of it, the more relatable his robot becomes.
“The trepidation I had was: Well, how do we do this without it being too cartoony? You know, like ‘beep-o-boop-bop,’ for lack of a better description,” Criss said in a conversation with Shen on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast. “The irony of all this is that the more ‘cartoony’ — the more you lean into this heightened beep-o-boop-bop — the more believable it is. … I’m almost playing this commedia dell’arte character. There’s a level of theatricality that exists within these robots that actually helps us understand the story quicker.”
“The wonderment is something that I’m really resonating with in both of these characters,” Shen added...READ MORE