Everybody needs somebody (or something) to lean on.
That’s the theme of Madeleine George’s ambitious but buggy techie drama, “The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence” at Playwrights Horizons.
The action takes place in 1876, 1889, 1931 and 2011, with three actors playing multiple roles.
The main characters — actually four of them — are all called Watson (all played with endearing charm by John Ellison Conlee). There’s three famous Watsons — Sherlock Holmes’ right-hand man, Alexander Bell’s assistant and an IBM supercomputer programmed for empathy — and a humble IT technician, Jerry Watson.
Each Watson is a faithful helper for various women played by Amanda Quaid. That includes Eliza, a computer scientist who is developing the computer’s human-like qualities; a BBC radio announcer who interviews Bell’s assistant years after the invention of the phone; and Mrs. Merrick, a distraught Victorian newlywed in fear of her violently moody husband (David Costabile, in one of his roles), who calls upon Holmes’ tweedy companion.
Leigh Silverman’s direction keeps the snack-sized scenes spinning on Louisa Thompson’s versatile set. But the era-jumping story’s strands about the needs, joys and perils of reaching out and connecting never tie together in a satisfying way, so the back-and-forths don’t really compute.
The complicated structure, while intelligent, feels artificial.
jdziemianowicz@nydailynews.com
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