The world has changed a lot since I first saw Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime at Off Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons a decade ago. The premise had once seemed like science fiction: A family with a mother in the first stages of memory loss creates a hologram/robot of her late husband who’s able to converse with his actual voice. Armed with machine learning, he’s also like a personified chatbot able to regurgitate actual memories and personality quirks that it accumulates over multiple conversations.
There’s surprisingly little fi to the sci-fi aspects of Harrison’s drama — which heightens our appreciation for the very human concerns of the characters here. June Squibb, who made her Broadway debut 65 years ago in the original Gypsy, brings a lovable feistiness to the role of Marjorie — a woman who draws comfort in passing the time with an avatar of her late husband, interestingly rendered as a young man like the one she first fell in love with (Christopher Lowell, walking a fine line between personable and robotic).
For Marjorie’s daughter, Tess, played by Cynthia Nixon with a brittle woundedness, it’s all a bit too much. The fact that her mom, always so hypercritical of her, has settled into a kind of addled sweetness as her grip on her memory loosens. The fact that’s she’s chosen a version of her dad (and Marjorie’s husband) that she never knew because he existed before she was even born. And perhaps most tellingly, the fact that her mom seems content to wile away her final days with this artificial intruder rather than connect with her flesh-and-blood daughter after all these years.
Maintaining human relationships is messy; our loved ones, even our children, don’t always respond the way we want — or the way we thought we had reared (programmed?) them to behave. Anne Kauffman brings the same well-calibrated balance that she brought to her Off Broadway production (which shared an almost identical physical design with Lee Jellinek’s spare, well-appointed suburban living room set Ben Stanton’s lighting, Daniel Kluger’s sound, and Márion Talán de la Rosa’s costumes).
The character who stood out to me this time was Tess’s husband, Jon, a preternatural mediator who sets Marjorie up with her husband-like companion and who comes to realize the limits of technology to patch human relationships that have frayed over time. (The inimitable Danny Burstein delivers another remarkable performance in the role, endeavoring to maintain a face of brave optimism even when grief and despair prove overwhelming.)
The final scene, imagining a future in which the machines we have created to help us carry on indefinitely without us, reinforces Harrison’s fundamentally humanist message. Marjorie Prime delivers a powerful message at just the right moment in our willing embrace of technology — the machines we build, the AI we trust, might be able to help us but they can never heal what’s broken in us. ★★★★☆
MARJORIE PRIME
Hayes Theater, Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through February 15 for $104 to $244
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