Phoebe Zeitgeist Returns to Earth

In 1974 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in his play Blood on the Cat's Neck, imagined a beautiful space alien on a mission to create a first-hand report on mankind. She landed in Nuremburg, Germany. Things didn't go well. Now, in 2016, in this new play by Charles Duncombe, the alien research team has decided to try again, this time with an artificial intelligence in the same shapely guise. Like the Phoebe of the 1970s, she can learn the words people say but not what they mean. Unfortunately, this time she lands in the United States. In an election year. Duncombe's play, inspired by Fassbinder's original, is a black-comic look at contemporary society and just how puzzling we might seem to an extraterrestrial intelligence eager to understand the irrational behavior of humankind.