Maybe Happy Ending
It might be happy
Welcome to the Warthog Report, the home for my fiction and non-fiction. This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I ramble about creative works of any medium that I enjoy. You can adjust which segments you receive here. Today we’re going to the theater for a new musical that just won a Tony.
I knew nothing about Maybe Happy Ending when my family had the fortune to see it on Broadway, only who one of the actors was, not even what role they played. So it was a pleasant surprise when it quickly became one of my favorite theater musicals. I felt a need to seek out discussion on it, but found my usual avenues did not produce much, fortunately this column is a perfect outlet for all that I need to express when I get this captivated by something.
Set in a somewhat distant future South Korea, Maybe Happy Ending follows two Helperbots, humanoid robot assistants, named Oliver and Claire. Except these aren’t current Helperbots, Oliver and Claire live in what is essentially a retirement home for robots, with Oliver and Claire belonging to discontinued lines.
Oliver stays in his room waiting for his owner to come back for him, but has his isolated waiting disrupted when Claire knocks on his door requesting to use his charger, as her own has broken. That is the catalyst that sets off the entire plot, as the stagnant world within Oliver’s room finally begins to change.
What stands out about the Broadway production right away is the staging. The Helperbot rooms are indeed small boxes, ones that move back and forth across the stage as needed. Which makes the difference feel immediate when there are scenes that use the whole stage instead of a small part of it.
Above the main stage are screens that play pre-recorded footage as needed, like phone calls or flashbacks. There’s also another piece of upper stage used for a jazz performer who is not actually part of the story, but provides several numbers. You never know which part of the stage the next scene will direct your eyes to.
Oliver inherited a love for old jazz music from his owner, and that is reflected in the above mentioned jazz numbers. You get the expected Broadway style songs and then some classic jazz, helping the music feel varied, an important part of a musical. The two styles never feel like they clash, since the jazz is tied in through characterization and theme.
The romance between Oliver and Claire felt authentic, with their somewhat hostile first meeting building into a natural chemistry with each other. It’s all about them, with other characters only appearing briefly and mainly in flashbacks.
For a focused one act musical, it also has some remarkable world building, where the implications of a few lines do much to paint a picture of the wider world these characters exist in. It wasn’t necessary, but the implications about the setting fascinate me, even as I feel some guilt for fixating on things that don’t matter to the core arc of the story.
There is one warning I’ll give before moving on to the spoilers, this is a deeply emotional musical. I have to be careful with which songs I listen to, some still have the power to make me cry. It doesn’t fixate on overwrought misery and random tragedy, it means every word of the title, including ‘happy.’ And that makes it all the more devastating to me.
The spoiler filled part that assumes you either watched the musical or don’t mind spoilers
Something that sticks with me is that Oliver and Claire turn out to have similar reasons for being retired, someone loved them too much. In Oliver’s case James’s son resented Oliver for being a ‘fake perfect son’ for James. Meanwhile Claire was retired for her owner’s husband falling in love with her. Both were punished for being loved, which makes the love they come to feel for each other more significant.
And I want to talk more about the implications with Claire’s backstory. When she’s being retired her owner says she isn’t getting a replacement Helperbot, which is followed by giving Claire her admin password and restoring her memories, while assuring her that it isn’t her fault. Yet the reason for not getting a replacement Helperbot is easy to imagine.
Being the designated owner of the Helperbot is a form of power in the family. Oliver is so fixated on James that he doesn’t recognize James’s son or the tension he caused within the family. The husband of Claire’s owner tries to erase Claire’s memory in a panic after being rejected, but Claire’s owner is the only one with the authority to do so, reinforcing the husband’s feeling of being an outsider.
To me this feels like the most realistic part of the future depicted, the replacement of human relationships with obedient fakes who can be easily discarded once tired of. There’s already signs of it with pets and the current state of AI, which in hindsight is a progression of asking questions, one of the most basic human interactions, being looked down with the response of ‘just google it.’
When we see the early interactions between Claire’s owner and her husband, there’s also a line indicating that Helperbots are considered common at a certain level of wealth, with the husband being pitied for not being used to Helperbots due to his lower class background. It’s shocking how much is implied about class in a single minor character with two total scenes.
After the show concluded, I immediately asked my family what they thought of the ending, as I was trying to gather my own thoughts. Why did Oliver keep his memories after their erasure being such a key plot point.
I see it as somewhat of a trick. What really mattered was that Claire believed Oliver would forget, so she’d trust that Oliver wouldn’t suffer the pain of outliving her.
From the start Claire is resolved in the face of death, she interacts with other Helperbots and so has had plenty of time to accept her mortality. It felt immediately obvious that her intent with going to see the fireflies was dying in a beautiful place, hence her lack of concern for when Oliver questions how she’ll return from Jegu without his charger. The moment seeing the fireflies came up, I fully expected the closing scene of the play to be the two of them dying under the light of the fireflies together.
Instead the fireflies were a mere turning point. Claire was fine with the idea of dying on Jegu, but only because she already knew her battery was decaying. She only had the idea because Oliver was the one who planned on going to Jegu. It wasn’t a plan for suicide, just a dying person making plans. She doesn’t need the fireflies to face death.
Oliver on the other hand grew past his ignorance and obliviousness to everything outside his room, coming to terms with the fact that he was indeed retired and James is dead. So we see that he did keep his memories, he kept the way he changed after meeting Claire, because a reversion back to the version of him who was patiently waiting for James, who is blind to mortality, would be too tragic. And from James we’ve already seen Oliver feels hope from memories of others, he was given a choice and chose to remember James.
Except, maybe Claire also didn’t erase her memories. I didn’t consider the possibility until seeing others raise it, but I see the room for it. Claire was also shown to have already made the choice to keep painful memories, her owner outright stated the password was given to her if she wanted to erase the memory of the husband’s love confession, which Claire kept. It wouldn’t be out of character for her to once again choose to keep the painful memories.
Either way the ending still works, as both are resolved and able to live out their final days in peace and acceptance. It’s not a tragedy, it may be the only happy ending there can be.