Theresa, Sarah and I went to watch a number of One Act Presentations of various plays directed by students at Eastern Michigan University last night.   It was a fun night with some great young talent.   One of the directors was Jon Dalton directing a cast of six in a scene from a play from the twenties titled R.U.R.  (Rossum's Universal Robots) .  An interesting glimpse into a play I look forward to seeing sometime in full.  Jon's cast was TOP NOTCH ! !   We were on the prop crew last night searching Ypsi for a ball of string.   Drugstores don't carry string, Dollar Stores do.  (Thank You G. P. S. - my artificial in auto intelligence)

One claim to fame in this play from the twenties is the invention and introduction of the term ROBOT.  If you ever listened to Jon's voice mail message (I don't suggest it) you would find evidence that Jon's empathy with the Artificial Ones knows no bounds.

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The play R.U.R. begins in a factory that makes 'artificial people' — they are called Robots, but are closer to the modern idea of androids or even clones, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves. Although they seem happy to work for humans, that changes and leads to the end of the human race due to a hostile robot rebellion. The play premiered in Prague in 1921. It was translated from Czech into English by Paul Selver, and adapted for the English stage by Nigel Playfair in 1923. Basil Dean produced it in April 1923 for the Reandean Company at St. Martin's Theatre, London. The play's U.S. premier was in New York City in October 1922.[1] It also played in Chicago and Los Angeles during 1923.[2]

After having finished the manuscript, ?apek realized that he had created a modern version of the old Golem legend. He later took a different approach to the same theme in War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant class in human society.

R.U.R is dark, but not hopeless, and was successful in its day in both Europe and the United States. In the American production, Spencer Tracy played one of the robots, in one of his earliest roles.

In February 1938, a thirty-five minute adaptation of a section of the play was broadcast on BBC Television — the first piece of television science-fiction ever to be produced. In 1948, another adaptation — this time of the entire play and running to ninety minutes — was screened by the BBC, and in between in 1941 BBC radio had also produced a radio play version. None of these three productions survive in the BBC's archives.

A more modern (1990) translation in English is available in Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Reader, published by Catbird Press.

The Hollywood Theater of the Ear dramatized an unabridged audio version of R.U.R. which is available on the collection 2000x: Tales of the Next Millennia  {ISBN 1-57453-556-0}[3].

The upcoming film adaptation, titled simply R.U.R., is slated for a 2011 release.

For more Wiki Information on R.U.R. Click Here