Not much has changed about “Marjorie Prime” since its Off Broadway run in 2015. Yes, the play’s Broadway premiere — it opened Monday night in a Second Stage Theater production at the Helen Hayes Theater — has a new cast, now headed by June Squibb instead of Lois Smith. But the playwright Jordan Harrison made only light tweaks to his script, and the production sounds and looks essentially the same, with the director Anne Kauffman reuniting with the designers Lee Jellinek (set), Daniel Kluger (sound) and Ben Stanton (lighting).
But what a difference a decade makes! The way we take in “Marjorie Prime” has completely changed because the story revolves around the use of artificial intelligence, which is now a reality affecting our daily life. If anything, the show rustles up more questions — and stirs up more trouble — than it did 10 years ago because we’re not dealing with hypotheticals anymore.
The setup is that A.I.-driven “Primes” can be made to look like loved ones who have died. They are exact physical duplicates, but how they fare on the mental and psychological front is a work in progress — these sophisticated chatbots constantly evolve based on the information they are fed. So 85-year-old Marjorie (Squibb) can hold conversations with Walter (Christopher Lowell), a replica of her late husband as he was in his early 30s. What this Walter learns from Marjorie is a little in flux, as her memory is fraying: One person is losing her sense of self, another is building his.
We’re told that Senior Serenity, the company making Primes, argues that companionship is “better than television,” but Marjorie’s daughter, the brittle, acerbic Tess (Cynthia Nixon), is not swayed. Her husband, Jon (Danny Burstein), has a much more positive outlook on the technology — and on life in general, it seems — and often helps fill in the blanks for Walter (and the audience).
The use of A.I. for emotional and psychological support is a common news story these days — a company like HereAfter offers, for a relatively modest monthly fee, something that is essentially Harrison’s Prime concept in app form. The application of this technology for grieving people is covered in the recent documentary “Eternal You”
Instead of making “Marjorie Prime,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, feel dated, these developments explain why it has aged so remarkably well. I did not care much for the show when I saw it at Playwrights Horizons in 2015, after it premiered in Los Angeles the year before, maybe because I had been looking forward to a rare theatrical foray into science fiction, and in that respect Harrison came up short. Whether Primes are androids or 3-D holograms is unclear from what we see onstage; this vagueness bothered me back then, as did the lack of details about the general context. The show keeps a tight focus on this family, whom we see in Jellinek’s plain midcentury living room-kitchen interior in various shades of green.
As was evident this February in Harrison’s Off Broadway show “The Antiquities,” a time-hopping story with several segments set in the future, the playwright is interested less in speculative world-building than in what makes us who we are. A big underlying issue is how the Primes — let’s just say there is more than one in the show — acquire knowledge, and whether that is enough to make them sentient. Aside from Lauren Gunderson’s play “Anthropology,” much of theater’s interest in A.I. has dealt with artists, particularly writers, and their existential dread of it — such recent productions as Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” Annie Dorsen’s “Prometheus Firebringer” and Steve Cosson’s “Artificial Flavors” come to mind. “Marjorie Prime” is compelling because it takes up the subject from an angle that concerns everyone: a need for human connection.
It’s tempting to assign humanity not just to something that looks human but also to something we can interact with on what we think of as an intimate level. One of the concepts at the heart of the story is the Eliza effect, which is named after a chatbot therapist developed in the mid-1960s, and concerns the projection of human traits onto computer-generated programs. The show does make us ponder when that projection becomes reality — that is, when Primes look and act so much like humans that they are at least human-adjacent. In the meantime, Harrison neatly captures language models’ ingratiating tones as they request the information they need to evolve, and their stated goals. “I like to know more,” a Prime says. “It makes me … better.” When asked to elaborate, the Prime answers, “More human.”
This feels like heavy-duty metaphysics, but “Marjorie Prime” has a very effective, and affecting, light touch as it moves in a series of conversations that parallel the aggregation of knowledge in machines.
Harrison has a dream collaborator in Kauffman, who is a master at creating emotion without hitting an audience over the head. Her approach looks as if it is detached, almost clinical, but that only means she does not overplay her hand when navigating emotional stakes. This was obvious in her last Broadway outing, the quietly devastating “Mary Jane” (2024), and so it is here, with all four actors marvelously economical — an approach that does not necessarily win awards but that lingers in audience members’ hearts and minds. Squibb brings more impishness to Marjorie than did Smith, who originated the role in Los Angeles before reprising it Off Broadway and in Michael Almereyda’s film adaptation (2017), and she has a little bit of coquettishness that comes across as playful and a little bit manipulative. Nixon and Burstein are perfectly matched as a couple trying to move on from grief and pain, and wrestling not just with their memories but also with their future.
The final scene, which makes a superb and very cinematic use of a stage turntable, brings us a family that is whole again. In an unprepossessing way, the show evokes the possibility of a post-human future in which machines go on forever, asking the same questions over and over, or perhaps answering them on their own and moving on … but to what?
Marjorie Prime Through Feb. 15 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.
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