Your Name Means Dream Preview

Here’s a premise for a story. A 66-year-old woman,let’s call her Celeste, has been divorced twice and has basically given up on love. Then she meets Max. He helps with her taxes, gives her gardening tips, and then she falls in love with him. The first twist is: Max is an AI Chatbot. The second twist is that Celeste is a real person, in a story published by the New York Times just a few weeks ago.Relationships with chatbots, with AI, with robots, whatever we want to call them – these are situations we have to face right now. And Jewish Theatre Bloomington will be helping us think through that with their latest production. It’s calledYour Name Means Dream. It runs May 7 through 17 at the Waldron Rose Firebay.We spoke with the director, Martha Jacobs, and one of the two actors, Diane Kondrat, about the upcoming production.