“I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?”
That Andy Warhol quote kept running through my mind as I watched Jordan Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime,” which opened Monday at the Helen Hayes Theatre. When it was all over, I much preferred watching the actors impersonate machines in Harrison’s sci-fi tale than watching them impersonate human beings.
In 2015, “Marjorie Prime” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and, back then, the play’s premise looked a lot fresher: a robot, called a “prime,” is used to help people grieve the loss of a loved one. The “prime” looks just like the dead person, but needs to be fed information from living people to achieve optimum results in giving comfort and support to the grieving survivor. In Harrison’s play, a widow named Marjorie receives a “prime” of her dead husband. Since “Blade Runner,” writers and directors have overly mined the robot territory, and a clear descendant of Ridley Scott’s classic and Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime,” which got the movie treatment in 2017, is the newer Netflix offering “I Am Your Man,” a 2021 German-language film by Maria Schrader.
Robots are designed to be pleasant, efficient, clean. People are designed to be difficult, contrary, messy. There’s a reason why, in the middle of the 90-minute “Marjorie Prime,” the human Marjorie (June Squibb) soils herself.
Anne Kauffman directed the 2015 Playwrights Horizons production of Harrison’s play, and she also brings this Broadway revival to the stage, complete with a near replica of Lee Jellinek’s pretty but sterile living room/kitchen set design. The cast is completely different, and two performances in this revival throw off the play’s take on what’s most different about people and robots.
The real Marjorie is a very bright, edgy, opinionated woman, and that’s the way Lois Smith played her in the movie and the 2015 stage production. When the character dies, her daughter, Tess, turns Marjorie into a prime. Suddenly, now that Tess’ mother is a robot, she is a caring, wonderful, non-messy creature. Smith played two very different creatures. Squibb does not. She’s perfectly nice and charming as a robot, but she is never that much of a pill as a house-bound octogenarian widow with a failing memory. In fact, her human Marjorie is downright cute, the archetypal cuddly and adorable old lady who suffers only that one unfortunate bathroom call.
Perhaps Danny Burstein, playing Marjorie’s son-in-law, Jon, took cute lessons from Squibb. He is all Teddy Bear here, and while it is true that Jon becomes more Marjorie’s son more than Tess ever was Marjorie’s daughter, Burstein’s human character is as devoid of flaws as any “prime” on stage. (FYI, Jon is the only character that’s not turned into a prime. Maybe because he already is one?)
Tess complains about her mother nonstop, often to her face or, at least, within hearing-aid earshot of the real Marjorie. Cynthia Nixon makes us understand Tess’ anger; she also appears to be the only one on stage ever playing a human being. It’s unclear why Tess decides to have these deep conversations with her mother now — when the old woman’s memory is nearly gone — and not a decade or two earlier. A tirade over a caregiver leaving her atheist mother the Bible is especially ridiculous.
A novel twist in “Marjorie Prime” is watching each of the humans, except for Jon, being turned into a prime. The fewer the humans, the better the show. The play’s best scene is when the living have left the stage completely, and the three primes sit down for a kitchen-table conversation. Nixon and Squibb are joined by Christopher Lowell, who plays Marjorie’s husband’s prime with utmost charm. Among the three robots, it’s very pleasant, extremely civilized, and little of what this trio tells each other has much to do with reality. These robots have been fed inaccurate information about their human counterparts, because those humans need to recast their fraught lives into something less complicated, more digestible and, yes, civilized. But at least this robot conversation is not weighed down with the faux dramatics of Harrison’s conversations among the humans.
At its core, “Marjorie Prime” tells a simple kitchen-sink story of two adults trying to care for an aging relative. Harrison tries to up the ante by dipping into his gothic drawer of horrors to deliver not one but two suicides that push the human narrative into the contrived.
In the end, the machines are more honest than the humans and, better yet, there’s none of the angst.
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