City Lit’s R.U.R. Brings Humor but Little Power

City Lit’s R.U.R. Brings Humor but Little Power

At City Lit Theater in Edgewater, Bo List’s adaptation of Karel Čapek’s famously influential play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) humors but fails to capture the original’s point or power. The Czech playwright’s 1920 work, which coined the term “robot,” utilizes a traditionally Russian four-act structure to chart the pride, fall, and defeat of humanity alongside a subsequent pseudo-rebirth. At Rossum’s Universal Robots, where the awkward but …