Editor's Note: The following view contains spoilers for Marjorie Prime. Read on with that in mind.
Picture the cleanest house you’ve ever seen. Or even a staged home for sale. Dressed in greens and creams, geometric designs butting against leafy wallpaper, perfectly placed groceries and monotonous glassware. A distinct lack of family photos, memorabilia, or knick knacks of any kind. It looks barely lived in, except for one leather chair accompanied by a side table littered with tissues, a throw blanket strewn atop it. The only signs of life, really.
This is the set up audiences walk into for the Broadway production of Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated dramedy introduced to New York audiences in 2015 at Playwrights Horizons. Though I had a vague idea of the play’s thematic engagement with artificial intelligence, as a raging AI hater for various ethical reasons, it’s safe to say I had my guard up.
Marjorie (June Squibb) is experiencing dementia and declining in her old age. She speaks with Walter Prime, a walking, talking, AI replica of her late husband, to help her recall stories from her life. Speaking with Walter Prime—which Marjorie, her daughter Tess (the formidable Cynthia Nixon), and son in law Jon (played judiciously by Danny Burstein) all do—programs him, injecting his complex inner workings with nostalgia and memory. Using this device over the course of the play, Harrison explores love, grief, and memory that keeps you guessing at every turn, and left me wondering, how can I love the people in my life better while we’re all still here?
While funny at times in a sanitized way (excluding when Marjorie makes randomly racist jokes and receives a mild chastisement, the play effectively treating this moment as such: “Grandma’s being racist again! Oh Grandma!” *cue canned laughter and bemused shaking of heads.*), Marjorie Prime truly shone in its portrayal of an imperfect but loving family, with Tess raging on her mother’s behalf in efforts to upkeep her quality of life and Jon gently supporting both. However, we’re quickly confronted with a mammoth family secret that most characters refuse to speak about and one does not remember. Haunted by their past, we’re asked if it’s better to censor memory, or to retraumatize for the sake of knowing that at least there was love?
The production design was a standout aspect of director Anne Kauffman’s production. Flashes of the stage in different states of change, going dark on the empty home, then a flash of Walter Prime staring at Marjorie’s empty chair, then a flash of the stage conspicuously missing the now-iconic chair—all of lighting designer Ben Stanton's choices function to signify change. Initially knocking the audience off-kilter, shifting our sense of time to keep us guessing and engaged. When the lights come back up, both Marjorie’s chair and Marjorie have been replaced, and we are introduced to Marjorie Prime. Tess, speaking to (or, perhaps, programming?) the Christmas sweater-clad AI estimation of her mother, wonders why the computerized representation resembles her mother in her final years, as opposed to the manifestation of Walter Prime, which presented as Walter (funnily enough) in his prime. Marjorie Prime simply responds, “Maybe I’m the Marjorie you still have things to say to.”
There is so much that goes unsaid in this family home. Stories are changed to avoid grief. Ironically, it seems to only create distance. While viewing Marjorie Prime I couldn’t help but think what a shame it is to go to such lengths to create the illusion of an opportunity to speak to someone or clear the air, once the opportunity to be honest with the people we love has passed.
Tess, in her grief, goes through a box of her mother’s belongings and finds letters from a suitor from Marjorie’s youth, one of which saying that he only knows her as she was in the past, but finds himself wanting to know her as she is now, 50 or so years later. There’s beauty in the willingness to love someone as they are, as opposed to the version of them we expect—or in this case, program. Burstein is heartbreaking as he realizes, having programmed a Prime, that he is only speaking to himself—stuck in a feedback loop of information that he’s provided instead of the person he wishes was there.
Though vaguely Chekovian, family dramas like Marjorie Prime don’t always make for the most thrilling storytelling. Yet here, the all-around stunning design and company of heartfelt, charismatic actors made this play sing, encouraging us to be patient, reserve judgement, give grace to and for the people we love, even (and especially) when it’s difficult. While technology advances and life starts to feel closer to science fiction, it remains true that we only have this life. And yes, it’s imperfect, and loving others well is challenging, and with love inevitably comes grief, but aren’t the memories we make and the stories we tell along the way invariably precious?
Marjorie Prime is playing now on Broadway at the Hayes Theater.
