Death and the Chatbot
- Jonathan Kalb
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was first produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons in 2015. Back then, this excellent futuristic play about bereaved people using AI avatars of their deceased loved ones for comfort and companionship struck me as a remarkably imaginative thought experiment. I missed the movie that was made of it in 2017 (movies of good plays tend to depress me because what matters usually evaporates), but I eagerly went to see the current remount of the play at Second Stage, directed and designed by the same superb team as at Playwrights—Anne Kauffman (director), Lee Jellinek (set), and Ben Stanton (lighting). Yet seeing Marjorie Prime again with a fine new cast turned out to be a bit of a shock.
Not because it has dated—it hasn’t. The shock is in the reminder of how much our relationship to AI has changed in a decade. Back in 2015, this subject could still amuse as a far-off fantasy. Today it’s a daily reality, foisted on us by hubristic tech lords like some locust swarm we’re supposed to applaud, and it’s hard to be amused by that. Everyone I respect is appalled by this phenomenon, recognizing it as an existential threat to memory, literacy, numeracy, interpersonal connection, and much more. In this environment, Marjorie Prime can’t be the cool sci-fi fable it once was. It feels instead like a grim ethical warning about the impending loss of fundamental human aptitudes.
The action is set in the 2060s, beginning when Marjorie, born in 1977, is 85. Played by the remarkable 96-year-old Broadway veteran June Squibb, Marjorie is discovered seated on an anomalous comfy recliner in an otherwise coldly spare, institutionally antiseptic, puke-green room. She’s conversing with a handsome young man who supposedly resembles her dead husband Walter at age 30. This is Walter Prime (a brand name, not a surname), played by Christopher Lowell, a bot supplied by the company Senior Serenity based on “a few zillion pixels.” Marjorie, we learn, is meant to “improve” Walter Prime by feeding him stories from their past. But given her age, loneliness, and mental deterioration, her stories are a disorganized agglomeration of fact, fiction, hallucination, and flirtation (albeit futile, since the Primes apparently can’t be sexual; they may even be holograms).
Marjorie’s 55-year-old daughter Tess, played with touching irritability by Cynthia Nixon, is the emotional driver of this drama. Tess is disgusted by Walter Prime, shivering at the “weird fountain of youth” version of her dad that her mother chose and also resenting the competition he poses for Marjorie’s attention. Tess’s husband Jon, played as an endearing rock by Danny Burstein, disagrees. He thinks Walter Prime could have genuine therapeutic benefits if properly trained, and he privately feeds him tales Marjorie and Tess have avoided, such as that of the horrific suicide of Tess’s brother at age 13. Jon hopes to unblock long-buried family conversations that should have happened but never did, but his dream proves as futile as Marjorie’s flirting.
What gives Harrison’s play emotional and imaginative amplitude is the way it traces the future of Jon’s dream through several leaps forward in time. In successive scenes (spoiler alert here), we see how Tess, and then Jon, interact with Primes when they in turn are bereaved and seek to salve unhealed wounds. The Primes of the recently dead are played by the actors we’ve just seen as the living people, and we immediately clock their jarring shifts to amiably clueless attitudes and voices. The loss of the beloved humans is palpably apparent here, but so is the consoling allure of the animated facsimiles.
Harrison’s writing is cleverly efficient, folding exposition into forward action again and again. We first learn of many plot developments, for instance, only when a human reports it to a Prime as training info. One result of this ceaseless efficiency, however, is a feeling of clinical detachment that pervades the whole play. Sex is minimized. The unbridgeable emotional gulfs between the needy human storytellers and their bloodless computerized listeners are foregrounded. Apart from two bitter yet fleeting emotional meltdowns, one by Tess and one by Jon, a decidedly cool wind blows through this work.
This is one reason Marjorie Prime struck me in 2015 as primarily a thought experiment. What’s changed today is the excoriating heat of the surrounding world.
Harrison’s final scene is his coldest of all. It’s set in a distant future when humans may have all disappeared. The script states: “a great deal of time has passed. Centuries maybe. Planets have turned, bones have been bleached, but none of it has touched this little room.” Three Primes—Walter, Marjorie, and Tess—sit around the table in the puke-green room, swapping the stories we’ve heard them learn from their model humans, now disconnected from any meaningful context. In Kauffman’s production, the table slowly rotates like a galaxy as they keep talking, and then breaks free of its domestic space, sliding out of the proscenium as if lurching toward the audience.
I discerned one note of hope in this impending disaster. Jon—the play’s only unshakably social character, who never abandons his push for human-human intercourse and who’s never seen as a Prime—is missing from the spinning tableau. Maybe we’re meant to imagine his descendants are out there somewhere, looking for friends in the void.
By Jordan Harrison
Directed by Anne Kauffman
The Helen Hayes Theater/2nd Stage