'The Perfect Woman' questions the concept with a blend of sly comedy and outrage.

Enter four characters. Seat them at a dinner party, add equal parts red wine, block cheese and outrage, and what you get is…perfection.

Monterey playwright Carl Alasko’s The Perfect Woman: An A.I. Love Story, which made its Monterey County—and world—premiere last weekend at the Circle Theatre in Carmel and continues April 2-4, is a compact, shifty comedic romp that follows the four characters over the course of one raucous evening. 

The action is centered around an AI-enhanced being named Kristen, played by Michelle Vallentyne, who is dating one of her creators, Diego, played by Ian Reid. At its core, the play puts into question not only how someone defines perfection, but also how we, as a society, respond to it.

“I think everybody’s got different ideas of what the perfect person is,” says director Nina Capriola. “That’s what the whole debate [in the play] is about.”

Reid reflects in this way: “Diego says that we, as humans, have been striving to create the perfect woman and now we’ve finally done it. So he perceives the perfect woman as an artificial creation.”

For context, both of Kristen’s principal creators—Mark (played by Mark Englehorn) and Diego—are men. And while Mark and Diego spend much of the one-hour-long performance ogling over their accomplishments, it is Mark’s wife Brianna (Niki Moon), who lends a critical eye to their idealizations.

“The perfect woman that I play becomes their nightmare,” Vallentyne adds with a chuckle. “It turns out she’s quite manipulative.”

“I really love the creative process,” Alasko says. “There’s absolutely no way for me to explain where ideas come from.” In the case of The Perfect Woman, “Sex is the major drive with the guys—until they realize it’s not.” 

He wrote the initial draft very quickly and then labored back and forth during revisions while Capriola assembled the inspired cast from the Peninsula area, one of whom—Englehorn—returns to the stage after a near six-year hiatus.

“The play is a modest projection into the future,” Alasko says. “It presents a model for what may or may not happen.”  

The Perfect Woman: An A.I. Love Story is performed at 7:30pm Thursday-Saturday, April 2-4. Circle Theatre, Golden Bough Playhouse, Monte Verde between 8th and 9th, Carmel. $18-$31. (831) 622-0100, pacrep.org.