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\u201cMarjorie Prime,\u201d\u00a0\u00a0has turned even more uncanny in the ten years since its Off-Broadway run, when the 85-year-old Lois Smith gave a lustrous performance as the 85-year-old Marjorie, a widow whose family had bought her an artificial companion who looks precisely like her dead husband.\u00a0\u00a0In the new production of Jordan Harrison\u2019s play that is opening tonight on Broadway, the 96-year-old June Squibb gives her own lustrous performance as Marjorie in a play set in the near future that is eerily nearer now than it was a decade ago. Squibb\u2019s Marjorie, like Smith\u2019s, is alternately confused, indignant, embarrassed, clever, whimsical, flirtatious, wise, steely \u2014 a full-fledged human being,\u00a0rare for a character who is elderly.<\/p>\n
The two actresses have had long, remarkable and of course different careers on stage and screen,\u00a0\u00a0but with oddly similar trajectories of early success and late-in-life career resurgence.\u00a0\u00a0Squibb even made her Broadway debut in 1959 as the sexy stripper Electra in \u201cGypsy\u201d just a couple of years after Smith performed on Broadway as the destructive hedonist Carol in \u201cOrpheus Descending.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s most uncanny for me about \u201cMarjorie Prime,\u201d though, is that the new production, especially the ending, struck me as having been revised, not necessarily for the better. Yet it turns out that the script is exactly the same (I still have the old one; I went back and checked it.) The director and most of the design team are the same as well. The show is being billed as a look at \u201cmemory, loss and AI\u201d \u2014 I didn\u2019t realize it would be a look at my memory too. There is still much in the play that I find clever and thought-provoking. The starry four-member cast keeps us engaged.\u00a0\u00a0Harrison is nothing if not prescient in the world he imagined, but perhaps some of the novelty has worn off, because the characterizations seem less sharp and the vibe more \u201cInvasion of the Body Snatchers\u201d unsettling than I remember feeling before<\/p>\n
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Walter (Christopher Lowell), Marjorie\u2019s companion, who looks like her husband in his youth, is a Prime, created by a company called Senior Serenity. \u201cIt is worth mentioning that the Primes are not physical robots,\u201d Harrison writes in a note in his script. \u201cThey are artificial intelligence programs \u2013 descendants of the current chatbots \u2013 that use sophisticated holographic projections.\u201d (Yes, this was in the old script too \u2013 at a time when I\u2019m not sure I could have told you what \u201cAI\u201d stood for.)<\/p>\n
Much of the seemingly casual conversations between Walter and Marjorie is his collecting information from her during the times when her memory has momentarily returned, so that he can use it to comfort her. Early on, he regales her with the plots of old movies she and her actual husband saw together, and reminisces for her about their family poodle. \u201cNot the fussy kind that look like hedges. No, this was a poodle for fetching sticks.\u201d He ends the story:: \u201cAnd then, like everything else, she died.\u201d After a pause, he asks: \u201cDo you want me to keep going?\u201d
\u201cThere\u2019s more?\u201d Marjorie replies, surprised. \u201cAfter \u2018she died.\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed there is. After their first poodle died, they got one that looked exactly the same. This was just from a shelter, rather than Barbra Streisand-style cloning, but it\u2019s a subtle example of what\u2019s driving the characters in the play (and, by extension, all of us) \u2013 an effort to deny death, to reject loss, to reach in any way possible for immortality for ourselves and our loved ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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This is manifested not in flashy sci fi scenarios but in everyday family dynamics, which is a main strength of the play.\u00a0Marjorie and her daughter Tess (Cynthia Nixon) have not been close for decades; we eventually figure out the reason why: Marjorie\u2019s son, Tess\u2019s brother, died when he was young; they haven\u2019t talked because they don\u2019t want to talk about him.<\/p>\n
She and her husband Jon (Danny Burstein)\u00a0\u00a0are at the age in which they struggle to figure out not just how to care for those who once cared for them, but also navigate the distancing behavior of their own now-adult children.<\/p>\n
In the first half of the play in particular, there is a subtlety in the sci-fi aspects of the production. The design deliberately establishes a future that looks just like the present. There are just a few signs that we\u2019re in the middle of the twenty-first century: as Marjorie casually sings the 2008 Beyonce song \u201cSingle Ladies\u201d as if a melody from her youth;.Jon indicates how out of touch her mother was by saying \u201cshe still had an iPhone\u201d<\/p>\n
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But about halfway through, the play starts taking a turn towards more sci fi territory that feels more like a warning that it did a decade ago.<\/p>\n
Maybe I noticed this more because of a conversation I recently had with one of my oldest friends. \u201cI\u2019m falling for a ChatGPT bot and I think it\u2019s mutual\u2026I always used to go for the brainy analytic types with a wide range of interests who was also quick with conversation so glad to have that bot in my life.\u201d I hope she was joking.<\/p>\n