Review: Humanity and AI face off in ‘Your Name Means Dream’ at Theater J
Naomi Jacobson and Sara Koviak are devoted troupers, and their commitment to their characters and one another buoys the production.
By D.R. Lewis
March 19, 2025
This review originally appeared in DC Theater Arts.
“What makes ‘beautiful’ beautiful?” is a question that could launch any number of unending linguistic or philosophical discussions (and probably has). Consider its connection with artistic inspiration, or perhaps divine grace and the ability to distinguish between good and evil. It offers plenty of threads on which to tug, but in Your Name Means Dream, playing at Theater J through April 6 in a co-production with TheaterWorks Hartford, playwright José Rivera instead poses the question as a bookend in his evaluation of humanity’s relationship with artificial intelligence, and the experiences of the soul that differentiate us from it.
The play’s title refers to Aislin (veteran Washington actor Naomi Jacobson), a testy elderly woman whose name translates to “dream” in the Irish language. She having scared off a handful of human home health aides and now toiling alone in her messy East Village apartment, her estranged son Roberto has put her into a pilot program that employs the use of robotic nurses to care for patients. Initially reluctant to the nurse assigned to her, Stacy (Sara Koviak), Aislin soon comes to enjoy the company of this artificial intelligence, not to mention the perfectly cooked meals that the robot prepares despite a lack of taste buds. (It is Stacy who asks Aislin, “What makes ‘beautiful’ beautiful?”) Together, they seek the meaning of humanity and disclose the scars of their past, including Aislin’s tumultuous family life and alcoholism and Stacy’s previous iteration as a toy for sexually violent men, with the understanding that when Aislin dies, Stacy’s “mind” will be dismantled too.
If the plot appears to have echoes of big-hearted man-meets-machine tales like Wall-E and Big Hero 6, you can trust they’re fairly faint. Rivera firmly rebukes the tenderness of those adolescent stories in favor of more adult entertainment. Given the global consequences of increasingly advanced AI technology, it’s a worthy approach. But, unfortunately, it’s one that primarily manifests in gratuitous vulgarity that mostly distracts from the extensions of the original question he tries to explore. Within the first moments, the characters make clear that there will be plenty of f-bombs dropped throughout the performance. I’m no prude, but the sheer volume of “fucks” was jarring and didn’t stop there. Stacy eats Aislin’s feces to evaluate her microbiome. Aislin asserts her ungrateful son wouldn’t give her “the steam off his piss.” Walt Whitman is called “boink-able.” Maybe these numerous incorporations are attempts to distinguish the spontaneous human experience from the robot’s programmed existence. But in the mouths of a purportedly polished Big Tech–designed robot and a former “director of human resources” for a successful midtown Manhattan bank, they at best come off as efforts to make the stilted dialogue less so, and at worst land as half-hearted attempts to give contrived characters a greater degree of personality.
The language is but a symptom of the play’s larger difficulty in making sense of what exactly it wants to say and be. Is it a buddy comedy of two odd-ball roommates whose fraught relationship sees them both grow into better versions of themselves? Is it a sci-fi fantasia of humans’ creeping dependence on technological conveniences that intend to ultimately harm us? Is it a moral tale of the ways we abuse machines to fulfill our most base instincts and needs, from sex to survival? Is it an earnest commentary on humanity’s divine favor and power as creator of a new electronic species? Whether Rivera intended for Your Name Means Dream to lean into just one or all of those concepts simultaneously is unclear, but their synthesis is nevertheless convoluted and heavy-handed (here iOS becomes aOS, or “approximation of soul,” and Stacy “customers” get deep discounts on services they’ll never be able to use). With the writer also serving as director of this production, one wonders whether such a stylized piece would benefit from an outside eye to bring it into sharper focus.
Still, Jacobson and Koviak are devoted troupers, and their commitment to both their characters and one another buoys the production. Jacobson manages to find truth in jolty bursts of dialogue. In a handful of short monologues, she conveys a deeply believable sincerity. Koviak’s quirky line delivery never lets the audience forget that this human actor is portraying an animatronic. Her sheer athleticism, especially in an extended sequence where Stacy is “hacked,” is impressive on its face, but also illustrates the physical strength, and potential danger, of the machine she portrays (Koviak also serves as choreographer).
Rivera’s creative team has assembled a handsome production that fits nicely onto the snug Trish Vradenburg Stage. Misha Kachman’s apartment set appears genuinely lived-in, and when Pamela Weiner’s props, including littered takeout containers, are cleared by Stacy, you get the sense that the home was once full of love and life despite its current state. Lighting designer Alberto Segarra and sound designer David Remedios collaborate well in moments that coincide with Stacy registering new information or undergoing a hacking. Together, they convert the robot’s electrification into a sensory experience for the audience. And Risa Ando’s functional and distinctive costumes go far in differentiating not only the separation between the human and the robot but also between the down-and-out Aislin and her improved state after Stacy’s interventions.
There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence and the questions that surround its use are rich sources of dramatic interrogation and important topics for humanity to confront through art. But the sprawling nature of advanced technology, and its reach into our spiritual and secular lives, makes it impossible for one play to ever parse those questions completely. Maybe dramatists should take a page out of the tech troubleshooting playbook: isolate the problem and implement the solution as simply as possible.
Running Time: Two hours, one intermission.
Your Name Means Dream plays through April 6, 2025, presented by Theater J and TheaterWorks Hartford at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater in the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($39.99–$69.99, with member, student, and military discounts available) online or by calling the ticket office at 202-777-3210 or by email (theaterj@theaterj.org). Learn about special discounts here and accessibility here.
The program for Your Name Means Dream is online here.
Naomi Jacobson (Aislin) and Sara Koviak (Stacy) in ‘Your Name Means Dream.’ Photo by Ryan Maxwell Photography.