Essay: Theatre as Counter Technology
For the first time in a long time, I reviewed a play! My essay on Marjorie Prime—Jordan Harrison's near-future family drama with androids—is now up on 3Views, a very cool theatre criticism publication that commissions three different takes on each play they cover, in three different styles of criticism.
If I could name a single New York experience I treasure, it would be the train rides back from midtown after you and your friend have seen a play. The play debrief is a crucial part of the theatre-going experience. Did you think the play was good? Did you think it was smart? What plot point did your friend understand that you completely missed?
Marjorie Prime opened Monday at Broadway's Hayes Theatre, and it stars June Squibb (who is killing it at 96—a Broadway record!), Cynthia Nixon (MY governor), Danny Burstein, and Christopher Lowell. I saw the play Saturday night with my friend Celia, who provided excellent analytic train ride companionship, and then I spent Sunday in a writing stupor trying to figure out what I thought about it. Marjorie Prime is a play written in 2014 about synthetic companions that replace humans after they die, and it was obviously revived now because of its resonances with the AI discourse. Which means you have to ask two questions when you see it: Is this a good play? and Is this a good play about AI now?
I focused on the second question for 3Views, where as the other 2 views in the issue give thoughtful insight on the play's treatment of memory and of grief. Having no insight into the other reviews before publication, it was cool to see how well they all fit together and diverged! Proof of concept for the mag!
The more I thought about the play, the more I liked what it was trying to do, even if it never quite got there because of hurried pacing and overwrought dialogue. But "overwrought" could be an adequate word to describe many aspects of the moment we're living through. The very characters splashed across newspapers feel overwrought, unbelievable caricatures of dystopian villains. Authoritarianism lacks subtlety, as does Silicon Valley, as does most media coverage of AI right now. The presents a significant narrative challenge: any realistic portrayal of tech now feels unrealistic, because the death-drive story the tech industry is telling is at obvious odds with most understandings of reality. Marjorie Prime strives to be subtle in its better moments, which means in many ways it fails to meet the current stakes. Intentionally or not, what the play does spotlight is the clash of the absurd, nihilistic futures pushed by companies that are now fully invested in the AI market and the failure of this technology to be of real use in our daily lives.
In the review, I tried to think through some of these tensions between belief and performance when it comes to depicting AI on stage. Thanks to friend & editor Emily Chackerian for asking me to write it, and thanks for reading. More soon!