Read the reviews of UNIVERSAL ROBOTS
Full review “Mac Rogers’ new play Universal Robots is one of the best new works I’ve seen in the theatre all year. This is no simple adaptation, though, but rather a sort of mashup of the original play, the Capeks’ biographies, and a good deal of mid-20th century history, all filtered through a very contemporary horror/sci-fi sensibility. The result is a drama that’s astute, ideological in the best possible way, and enormously compelling and entertaining. It’s a tremendously skillful alternative history, culminating in a robot rebellion that makes for an edge-of-your-seat finish equal to the best story-telling of stage or screen. There’s plenty to mull over, ideologically and dramatically, after the curtain comes down. This is brilliant drama.” - NYTheatre.com
Full review “Universal Robots is a play that is not only a current must-see, but one that deserves more productions. It deserves bigger stages and audiences. It, like the sentient robots it depicts, deserves a life.” - Pink Raygun
Full review “Universal Robots isn’t campy, cheesy sci-fi. It’s a work that is capable of shaking you to the core, forcing you to examine your own humanity, ideals, and faith. It was not what I was expecting, and it was everything that I look for in a piece of theater. That has a lot to do with Mac Rogers, a prolific playwright whose work I’d never seen before and will now probably go and see forever. His dialogue is humorous and poignant, and the characters he’s created are finely-etched and lived-in, human and robot alike.” – SF Scope
Full review“Living in a time and place where so much of the popular entertainment is geared toward the lowest common denominator, it is an absolute joy to discover a writer who is creating epic and challenging works of art. Mac Rogers has done exactly that with his surprising Universal Robots, currently being performed at Manhattan Theatre Source. It is one of the strongest, most exciting plays I’ve seen in years. This one is not to be missed.” - Theater Online
Full review“Rogers’ version is equal parts historical drama and parable, expertly presenting the moral and political gray areas a servant class of robots would necessitate. The robots’ affecting journey into sentience (and the parallel journey of those who manufactured them) is at once funny, stirring and horrifying. While Rogers’s sci-fi fable concludes that Dawkins’ ever-evolving romance between the organic and the inorganic might end in heartbreak, he also suggests that inhuman robots could eventually learn to be humane. This leaves us with a final allegory, I suppose, about how all the things we make – like art, war, and love – have our best traits programmed into them.” – OffOff Online
Full review “How do you promote art, theater, music, and poetry in a deteriorating, postwar society? How do the dreamers of a nation remain true to their ideals and still connect to the civilians they hope to inspire? Mac Rogers succeeds in answering such questions through a fresh voice of reason and astuteness with his ambitious new play, Universal Robots. An intelligent play that leaves no room for error, Rogers has created a contemporary gem that urges its audience to ponder whether the need for human contact and interaction can be discarded while still maintaining a collective sense of initiative, justice, and achievement. His alternate telling of the past ninety-plus years illustrates a world where toil and suffering can be handed off to an indifferent, unfeeling working class with astounding ramifications. In fact, this scientific upshot rewrites the entire history of the second half of the Twentieth Century. No, not history — in an age of asexual technology, it’s more like a rewrite of “itstory,” a rewrite with a staggering, gripping conclusion.” – New Theater Corps