When Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime first premiered in 2014, its vision of synthetic sentience may have felt pretty novel. An old woman, Marjorie, talking to a hologram modeled after her long-dead husband perhaps seemed like a wild, far-fetched idea, that a computer program could somehow closely mimic the cadence of real conversation, could fake intimate knowledge of a person’s life. What a strange and alienating idea.
Just 11 years later (and eight years after a little-seen film adaptation), Marjorie Prime plays far more credibly. We may not have the hologram technology down quite yet, but everything else in Harrison’s AI speculation now seems well within reason. Perhaps that’s why Second Stage Theater decided to revive the play in its Broadway house, an attempt at commenting, and capitalizing, on the excited buzz and nervous chatter surrounding recent technological advancements.
Whether or not this has been actual advancement and not instead a terrible deviation toward a brainless future is perhaps best left for others to debate, outside the confines of a theater review. What can be said here is that this Marjorie Prime, directed with restraint by Anne Kauffman (who was also behind the off-Broadway production in 2015), is both helped and hindered by its sudden relevance. It presents an intriguing and poignant suggestion of what might exist just a few decades from now, but perhaps doesn’t suggest enough. With its novelty gone, Marjorie Prime must rely more firmly on its internal mechanics, which can be creaky.
June Squibb, enjoying a remarkable later-life career peak, plays Marjorie, born in 1977 and now 85 years old, well on her way to shuffling off this mortal coil. She’s looked after by her daughter, Tess (Cynthia Nixon), and son-in-law, Jon (Danny Burstein), but spends much of her time alone in her lounge chair. Though, by some measure, Marjorie isn’t alone at all. She’s frequently joined by a projection of her husband, Walter (Christopher Lowell), at what we can guess was his prime, handsome and turtlenecked in his 30s, gamely remembering cute stories about movie dates and dearly departed family pets.
Something grim lurks at the edges of these reveries into the past, an occasional mention of a son who died many years ago. Tess believes that in at least one crucial way, Marjorie’s dementia is doing her a favor. Why should she remember the great tragedy of her life? Jon – who has a warm and playful relationship with Marjorie that Tess envies – disagrees. Marjorie should have access to a full recollection of her experience; he tells the Walter AI everything, so it can better relate to Marjorie.
Marjorie Prime is ultimately more about memory and mortality than it is about technology. It’s a rumination on what, if anything, a life amounts to when it’s done. Tess, played with aching clarity by Nixon, is flailing to find the purpose in any of it. She is experiencing the existential astonishment and terror of anyone who has watched a loved one slip away, desperate to find the grand meaning in her mother’s life, and in her own. What the Walter bot represents is something like an afterlife, a ghost willed into existence by the grieving living. Is such a thing a tool of comfort, or delusion?
Harrison, in his poetic but sometimes cliched language, suggests it is a little bit of both. Our time on Earth is terribly fleeting, and isn’t that sad? But also some part of us does linger on in those who knew us, those who tell our stories, who reach fondly for us in moments of nostalgia. If tech can somehow aid in that, perhaps we should let it. Marjorie Prime is frustratingly ambivalent about that idea, tossing it around and wanly entertaining both sides of the argument before it ventures off into what perhaps interests Harrison more. With its tech conceit set aside, Marjorie Prime is mostly a story of trauma echoing through generations of a family, which is a quite common theme within the American theater canon.
Marjorie Prime finds some lovely ways to till that old earth, but does nothing big or revolutionary enough to fill a Broadway house (small as the Hayes Theater might be). Only Nixon does the work of making the play seem urgent, worthy of its new high-profile positioning. Squibb is great with a wry one-liner, but she’s really only got that one level. We never feel the fear, the grief, the desperation that is meant to underscore Marjorie’s condition. Burstein, such a reliable musical-theater performer, is too broad for this small, quiet play. Lowell, meanwhile, doesn’t have much to do beyond being blandly charming.
But Nixon scratches at the deeper thing roiling beneath Kauffman’s polite production, the howling bewilderment of it all. Nixon is a great and necessary counterbalance to the AI’s cold, placid approximation of personhood. No computer program, no matter how convincing, could ever sufficiently simulate the frenzied contradiction of a human being trying to comprehend their place in the fullness of time. Nixon, in her climactic scene, tears through all of the play’s mannered construction and shows us to ourselves. Let’s see a hologram try to do that. Or, better yet, let’s not give it that prompt at all.