Los robots no lloran (Robots Don’t Cry) is an adaptation for Mexico of the puppet show titled Manufacturing Mischief, created by Pedro Reyes during his teaching engagement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he offered a class titled “The Reverse Engineering of Warfare: Challenging Technooptimism and Reimagining the Defense Sector.”

The course explored the interplay of imperialism, armed interventions, popular entertainment and the global imbalances created by the West’s fixation on technological advancement. The class resulted in this production which incorporates creative enactments of the actual facts and the (often unasked) ethical questions faced by society today.

As visiting artist in the MIT program in Art, Culture and Technology, Reyes met with Noam Chomsky, to whom he proposed making a play featuring his persona as the protagonist. In Los robots no lloran, the character of Noam Chomsky finds an antagonist in Ayn Rand, who has never been seriously considered in academia but whose pernicious influence remains present, especially among Trump’s followers and the American far-right. Meanwhile, Elon Musk embodies the present-day technocratic hero, in the tradition of Henry Ford and Steve Jobs. These and other characters are brought into the play by a deus ex machina called the “iWay”, a machine that resuscitates authors from their books.