Matthew Charman’s ‘The Machine’ in New York

Two men sit opposite each other at a table, heads bent over a chessboard, their concentration fierce. Silence.

Suddenly lights flash, buzzers sound and two huge video cameras on rolling dollies swoop onstage like helicopters, manned by cameramen in black. The sight of those giant instruments (each the size of a human being), circling the chess players like prehistoric pterodactyls, is one of the most weird and frightening images I’ve seen onstage in a long time.

Welcome to the unsettling, high-tech world of The Machine, the theatrical spectacle conceived by British playwright Matthew Charman and director Josie Rourke. The Machine recounts the historic 1997 chess match between Russia’s Garry Kasparov (then 34), the undefeated world champion, and Deep Blue, an IBM computer. It’s the stuff that modern tragedy is made of, because it involves a noble protagonist who, due to a tragic flaw (being human), suffers a downfall.

The stakes are high, and director Rourke has fashioned a mise en scène to reflect it. She’s set her match as a global sporting event in the cavernous, 55,000-square foot Park Avenue Armory, complete with a four-sided arena and a huge electronic scoreboard, on an empty stage with nothing but a life-size table, two chairs, and (of course) a chessboard.

Killer instincts

Once the game begins, the videocams capture and broadcast every move onto four jumbotrons hanging from the ceilings facing each of the four bleachers. Indeed, technology seems to be the appropriate theater metaphor for a play about a chess match between a man and a computer, and Rourke has exploited it to maximum effect.

Kasparov, a wunderkind from Baku, learned chess watching his father at the age of four and became obsessed with it. Chess happened to be a game that Stalin favored, so his mother was able to enroll him in a chess school and manage his meteoric rise to become, in 1985, the youngest world champion in chess history.

Between his charismatic personality and his killer instincts, Kasparov checkmated his way to the top, destroying his opponents with psychological warfare as well as brilliance. After 20 years and five challenges to his world title, he had become an international celebrity. He had never lost a game, and he and his mother were determined to keep it that way.

IBM’s motive

Meanwhile, a Frankenstein was in the making. Another wunderkind— Taiwan-born Feng-Hsiung Hsu— shared Kasparov’s single-minded passion for chess, albeit from a computer science perspective. After earning his Ph. D. at Carnegie Mellon in computer chess, he was swooped up in 1989 by IBM, which saw a rare opportunity to make its mark by exploiting the game.

At the time, IBM was struggling to keep its place in the world market against the rising Microsoft. It hired Dr. Hsu to invent a computer program that could defeat Kasparov with the whole world watching, thereby making a corporate comeback and raising its stock significantly.

The wily Russian had already anticipated this move. Computer chess had been on the rise for a decade, and Kasparov took it upon himself to learn it, so that he could beat a computer at its own game.

Creative computers?

The first match between Kasparov and Deep Blue occurred in 1996, with Kasparov as the victor. Even though the one-ton computer was able to analyze 500 million positions per second, it couldn’t yet anticipate Kasparov’s moves far enough ahead in the game.

So IBM brought on a team of Kasparov’s past competitors to assist Hsu in updating the programming and teaching the computer to be “creative” as well as calculating. By the second match, Deep Blue could analyze 288 billion potential positions in a 40-move game.

Playwright Charman manages to pack all this rich back-story into the flashback scenes, while moving this action-packed 100-minute play forward at a breakneck speed.

”˜Ask God’

Moreover, the playwright has made the inspired choice of featuring Dr. Hsu as a major dramatis persona in the story, not only as Kasparov’s opponent but also his mirror image: a protagonist on a parallel journey to win at any cost. Kasparov insists that Hsu sit opposite him at the table while Deep Blue instructed Hsu to execute the moves— thereby creating a scenario of hand-to-hand combat to the death.

“You have to become inhuman,” says the voice in Kasparov’s head, coming from one of his mentors from the past. “That’s what it takes to unleash destruction. Ask God if you’re that kind of player.”

Needless to say, the high-tension dramatization of the actual match had everyone in the audience sitting on the edge of our seats.

First defeat ever

Rourke directs her agile actor/opponents (Hadley Fraser as Kasparov and Kenneth Lee as Hsu) to play chess in a stylized, exaggerated choreography. An unbearable foreboding hangs over every move, as Kasparov senses that, for the first time in his career, he might actually be defeated.

“You’re trying to destroy me,” he cries out to Hsu, accusing his opponent of cheating, demanding to open “the box” that houses Deep Blue for inspection.

Ultimately, as we know, Kasparov is defeated for the first time in his career. “It learned you,” Hsu says, definitively. “That’s how it won.”

Humiliated, Kasparov demands a rematch with Hsu personally. “I can’t play you, Garry,” Hsu replies sadly. “I’m not good enough.”

Nothing to fear?

In one of the play’s final moments, Kasparov and Hsu stand together, watching two delivery men wheel the box containing Deep Blue away to its final destination: the Smithsonian. Kasparov can’t inspect it, Hsu can’t keep it. Both have lost.

I doubt that you’ll find a more ominous, disturbing development in our times than that of “artificial intelligence”— the ability of a machine to understand a man and predict his unpredictable behavior. Although Hsu insists, “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I’m not so sure. This play about technology using technology penetrates deep into our contemporary psyches with a disquieting, prophetic power.

On the other hand, the performance of The Machine that I was originally supposed to attend was cancelled because of “technical difficulties.”