What: 2nd Stage revival of Jordan Harrison's play about Marjorie, a woman in her 80s with Alzheimer's interacting with a new technology of holographic people called Primes who are taught to be the embodiment of lost love ones, through the stories told to them by those who still remember. Marjorie's adult daughter Tess struggles with the idea of this technology, both as an evocation of her dead father and as an imperfect and filtered version of reality: a Walter who is taught a gussied up version of his marriage to Marjorie and who isn't told about his son Damien who died many years ago.
And? The wildest thing about this play to me is that it was written years before ChatGPT existed, because it seems like such a good conversation piece to have in regards to that particular AI application, full of half-truths culled from many sources, but also full of hallucinations (and frankly terrible counting skills--ask my sister). Walter Prime tells Marjorie the story of the night he proposed, but Marjorie asks him to overwrite it so they saw Casablanca rather than My Best Friend's Wedding. The death of their son Damien irrevocably changed the entire family, and yet Marjorie hasn't spoken Damien's name since he died. Walter Prime learns from her the story of their marriage, their daughter, their two dogs, but not a word about their son. And as each memory is overwritten with a newer glossed-over draft, it steps further and further away from reality and into the realm of fairy tales. Spoilers ahead, so stop reading now if you don't want them! As each subsequent character passes away, to be reincarnated into their blank page version to be written and rewritten, we step further and further away from reality: each new self has softened edges, removing conflict and unkindness, erasing trauma and baggage for theoretically easier communication, but instead creating smudged carbon copies. In the final sequence, the three remaining Primes sit around a table telling each other their stories, each one not quite true, but yet in full consensus. It's an excellent demostration of the inferiority of AI art to human-created art: AI art can regurgitate and collage, but it cannot invent, whereas human-created art can do both. The final sequence of these three Primes in their loop of half-truths and elided facts also got me thinking about the line I heard once, that you only truly die when there's no one left alive who remembers you (Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt explores this theme beautifully). Here at the end when only Primes remain, with no one left alive to remember Damien, the poor unhappy son is dead at last.
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| June Squibb and Cynthia Nixon as Marjorie and Tess. Photo by Joan Marcus. |
Streaming Theater
- Shakespeare in the Park's summer production of Twelfth Night, hosted on PBS.
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