When the robot apocalypse bursts into your emergency shelter, you probably won’t spend your final moments worried about efficiency. You might instead do, say and feel things that robots, as well as the profit motive that created them, would have a hard time explaining.

Pondering artificial intelligence might begin with questions about how to most convincingly imitate humans and what drudgery (and cost) robots might spare us. But as the staggeringly prescient 1920 play “Rossum’s Universal Robots” points out, we end our inquiry there at our peril.

Karel Čapek’s sci-fi satire, now in an exuberant, playfulCutting Ball Theaterproduction that opened Friday, Oct. 20, at the Exit on Taylor, imagines an island robot factory that ships orders of lifelike droids across the globe by the thousands. When Helena (Alexis Royeca) first visits, spurred by her radical humanist mission to liberate the robots and insist that they have souls but with the red carpet rolled out for her thanks to her father’s political power, you might not be able to say for sure who’s flesh and blood and who isn’t. Sulla, a secretarial bot, is a dead giveaway, thanks to actor Rebecca Pingree’s squinty, glassy-eyed smile, chirpy inflection and extra “does not compute” beats before speaking.

But even Dr. Domin (Nic A. Sommerfeld), explaining the robots’ invention and function to the newcomer, isn’t a sure bet. He might roll his eyes at Sulla’s unhelpful responses or how he has to explain every little thing to her, but his own social cues are glitchy, too. He can’t stop interrupting Helena. He gets fixated on which idiomatic expression might be most appropriate to deploy. And he keeps not-so-accidentally invading Helena’s personal space — a hand held too long, a snatched kiss — and then not knowing what to do with himself once he’s invaded it.

Adapted and directed by Chris Steele, using a translation from the Czech by Paul Selver, “Rossum’s Universal Robots” reads in our own age of Alexa, Siri, Waymo and ChatGPT as a cri de coeur. It demands that we ask what, if anything, is so special about being human and what our purpose is. If robots can take more and more tasks off our hands, if they can simulate everything from disdain and rage to courtship and yearning for freedom, what’s so important or meaningful about non-machines’ versions? Why should we bother to exist if robots can do it for us?

“Rossum’s Universal Robots,” which is frequently abbreviated to “R.U.R.” and which gave the world the word “robot,” inspires these questions not through diatribe or didacticism but through hint and humor.

That’s especially true in Steele’s version, which interpolates an epilogue that was written partly by ChatGPT and dance breaks that, hilariously, could have been, too. It’s choreography as a dance move salad, as playlist algorithm that sees ballet, rave, hand jive and aerobics as interchangeable.

Two of the four cast members — Royeca and Jesse Dim — are making their professional debuts with this production, but Steele’s precise, meticulous direction reveals newbies and veterans alike as full-fledged artists. Every turn of the head communicates; every inflection tells an unwritten story. Just mark how Pingree’s Dr. Alquist can change the temperature in the room or build, from one line, the fulcrum on which an entire scene pivots.

用双手Royeca海伦娜携带自己的方式primly folded, head held high in self-possession even as she might furrow a brow in curiosity, frustration or suspicion, makes possible one of the script’s great charms: how all the men on the island trip over themselves falling in love with her. And Dim, as one of the first robots with a soul — which is to say, with murderous loathing — stalks onto the stage with a gait and a glare more frightening than any jump scare or special effect. Every step is a barely controlled effort to hold back something much, much worse.

That’s just one hypothesis “R.U.R.” posits about what makes us human: our capacity for anger and our lust for power. But without beating you over the head, this remarkable show might make you think of others. Perhaps it’s also our urges to make meaning and appreciate beauty, to waste time, to be silly and to connect with other flawed, unknowable beings who stop us in our tracks and make us wish we were better.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com