Lafayette College theater director Michael O'Neill has never seen the classic Czech play "R.U.R," but after teaching it in his theater classes for years, he became intrigued by the relevance of its premise.

So after reading many translations of the play about robots and a mechanized world where people show no emotions, O'Neill decided to write his own translation and produce it at the college. The play opened Wednesday and continues through Saturday at the Williams arts center.

"I made a lot of cuts," O'Neill says. "In those days, they tended to be awfully talky."

"R.U.R." or "Rossum's Universal Robots" was written in 1920 by Karel Capek. It was a response to the death and destruction he had witnessed during World War I and the emotional dislocation and upheavals of the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia.

The play was written as an expressionistic journey into genetic engineering on a mass scale, O'Neill says. It predicted a mechanized world where people have no emotional connections and where workers have lost their human rights. The play takes place in a factory that makes Robots that can think for themselves and can be mistaken for humans.

"I thought that the play had a lot to say about today and our interest in human cloning and our dependence on technology," O'Neill says. "I was concerned about our growing dependence on our cell phones and our computers and the increasing mechanization of everyday life. I also thought that that this play was particularly relevant to Lafayette, which has such a big engineering program."

The play was the first to introduce the word robot to the English language.

"Actually the word robot means 'worker' in Czech, and the Robots in our production look less like Hollywood robots than Soviet workers from the 1920s," O'Neill says. Costume designer Locklyn Brooks has created gray and monochrome outfits that make the Robots look less like machines and more like people, he says.

O'Neill says the play is not so much science fiction as a social satire with a utopian vision.

"This is actually a very traditional play, and despite the presence of the Robots, its main theme is that the human race needs love to be able to survive," he says.

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Lafayette's 'R.U.R' deals with robots, role of technology