Review by Marjorie Prime – Cynthia Nixon steals a sad, choppy sci-fi revival | Broadway

WWhen Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime premiered in 2014, its vision of artificial consciousness may have seemed very new. An elderly woman named Marjorie, speaking to a hologram modeled after her long-dead husband, may have seemed like a wild and far-fetched idea that a computer program could somehow imitate the rhythm of a real conversation, and could fake intimate knowledge of a person’s life. What a strange and repulsive idea.

Only 11 years later (and eight years after a little-seen film adaptation), Marjorie Prime plays her role with much greater believability. We may not have stopped using hologram technology yet, but everything else in Harrison’s AI speculation now seems within reason. Perhaps that’s why Second Stage Theater decided to revive the play on Broadway, in an attempt to comment on and capitalize on the exciting hype and nervous chatter surrounding recent technological developments.

Whether or not this is actual progress, and not instead a terrible digression into a mindless future, is perhaps best left for others to discuss, outside the confines of theatrical review. What can be said here is that this Marjorie Prime film, directed with restraint by Anne Kaufman (who was also behind the off-Broadway production in 2015), is both helped and hindered by its sudden importance. It makes an interesting and poignant suggestion of what might exist a few decades from now, but perhaps it doesn’t suggest enough. With her novelty gone, Marjorie Prime must rely more strongly on her internal mechanisms, which can be troublesome.

June Squibb, enjoying the peak of her later brilliant career, plays Marjorie, born in 1977 and now 85, on her way out of this mortal coil. She is cared for by her daughter Tess (Cynthia Nixon) and son-in-law John (Danny Burstyn), but she spends most of her time alone in her lounge chair. Yet, to some extent, Marjorie is not alone at all. She’s frequently joined by the image of her husband, Walter (Christopher Lowell), who we can guess was in his prime, a handsome, turtlenecked 30-something, gamely recalling fond stories about movie dates and long-gone family pets.

There is something dark lurking at the edges of these dreams in the past, an occasional mention of a son who died many years ago. Tess thinks Marjorie’s dementia is doing her a favor in at least one way. Why should she remember the greatest tragedy in her life? John – who has a warm and playful relationship with Marjorie and whom Tess envy – disapproves of this. Marjorie must be able to access the full recollection of her experience; Walter tells the AI ​​everything, so he can better communicate with Marjorie.

Marjorie Prime is ultimately more about memory and mortality than technology. It is a rumination on what life amounts to, if anything, when it ends. Tess, played with painful clarity by Nixon, does his best to find purpose in any of them. She experiences the existential wonder and horror of anyone who has watched a loved one slip away, desperate to find the greater meaning in her mother’s life, and in her own life. What Walter’s robot represents is something like the afterlife, a specter that the grieving living have wanted into existence. Is such a thing an instrument of comfort or illusion?

Harrison suggests, in his poetic but sometimes banal language, that it’s a little bit of both. Our time on Earth is fleeting, isn’t that sad? But there is also a part of us that lingers in those who knew us, those who tell our stories, and those who reach out to us fondly in moments of nostalgia. If technology can somehow help achieve this, perhaps we should allow it. Marjorie Prime is frustratingly ambivalent about this idea, bringing it up and weakly entertaining both sides of the argument before venturing on what might interest Harrison more. Technological conceit aside, Marjorie Prime is mostly a story of trauma that resonates through generations of a family, an all-too-common theme in the American theater canon.

Marjorie Prime finds some wonderful ways to till that old ground, but she does nothing big or revolutionary enough to fill a house on Broadway (as small as the Hayes Theater). Only Nixon takes on the task of making the play seem urgent, worthy of its new high-profile status. Squibb is great in her satirical style, but in reality she only reaches this one level. We never feel the fear, sadness, or despair that Marjorie is meant to project. Boorstin, an authoritative musical theater performer, is too broad for this quiet little play. Meanwhile, Lowell doesn’t have much to do other than be a nice wizard.

But Nixon scratches at the deeper thing that fluctuates beneath Kaufman’s mannered production, the stark bewilderment of it all. Nixon is a great and necessary counterbalance to the character’s cold, calm AI. No computer program, no matter how convincing, can adequately emulate the frenetic ambivalence of a human being trying to understand his place in the fullness of time. Nixon, in her climactic scene, tears down all the polite structure of the play and shows us to ourselves. Let’s see a hologram trying to do this. Or better yet, let’s not give her that claim at all.