DADBOT (working title)

In early 2023, Lee’s 10-year polyamorous partnership with a cis-man who they thought they’d spend the rest of their life with completely fell apart. While sitting with the grief, they began to hear the voice of their dad who died in 1994, like he was having a conversation with them in their head. Now, they are curious about the connection between this epic failure of their relationship with a man, and the sudden presence of the missing patriarch in their life. Lee will resurrect their father using different modes of AI and then be in a simulation of an intimate father-child conversation. They will be using two seminal texts about their family: a Japanese booklet written in 1974 by their deceased father Tosh Lee attempting to map out his Zainichi Taiwanese family tree (“Zainichi” refers to the people residing in Japan who’ve been ethnically Othered due to imperialism and oppression caused by Japan). And the other is a Japanese book written by their mother Aoi Lee about her experience of being beside her husband while he was dying of cancer.

Lee has connected with a translator who is also a budding playwright, Haruka Ueda, who has agreed to translate both texts. They have also been in touch with their dad’s relatives after a long bout of estrangement, and their cousin Hiro Lee, now in his 70’s and a retired academic, has agreed to be interviewed by them. The performance will be a collage of all this information and will have versions of their father existing iteratively. They will be working closely with their collaborators Kento Morita (actor and conversation designer for AI) and Jared Mezzocchi (award-winning director and multi-media designer) and they will design from scratch AI functions that will manifest Lee’s father on stage. In doing so, the piece will also touch on the growing fears around AI: from misinformation, climate degradation, how it amplifies human biases, and the existential threat of it all.

The performance, which will at times feel much like a two-person public dialogue or a low-budget talk show like Between Two Ferns, will span Tosh Lee’s experience of migration, growing up Taiwanese in Japan, and the culturally forbidden love between him and Lee’s mother. In turn, Lee will show him reenacted scenes from their 10-year polyamorous relationship, its joys and failures, and receive “fatherly advice.” Together, they will gaze at different versions of “daddy” as it appears in popular culture, kink, and power dynamics, and discuss how transgression has been a motivation in both of their lives. And finally, Lee will ask his permission to play him on stage. This piece will capture a subversive, surreal humor, and a levity in “raising the dead.” At the heart of it is a deep yearning to understand love and fatherhood, the rage of losing a parent, and to make public this kind of grief work.