NHTC Primes Audience For An Uneasy Future

Walter Prime is on a roll. Already, he has reminded Marjorie about the night he proposed, the way the car drove away from My Best Friend’s Wedding and toward a future together. And Marjorie, perched to nearly the edge of her chair, now wants to know if she ever found a gay best friend like George Downes, who spends the entire movie delivering insipid one-liners to Julia Roberts.

“I don’t have that information,” Walter Prime says. His voice flatlines just a little.

It’s a surprisingly common interaction for Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime, the latest from director Trevor Williams and members of the New Haven Theater Company (NHTC). After opening last weekend, the play runs this Thursday through Saturday at EBM Vintage on Chapel Street. Tickets and more information are available here.

Set in the not-too-distant future—2062, if we are to go by Marjorie’s birth year plus her current age—Marjorie Prime opens on 85-year-old Marjorie (a winning Margaret Mann) and Walter Prime (Ryan Hendrickson), an evolved hologram who resembles Marjorie’s late husband Walter. That is, a young version of Marjorie’s late husband Walter, which works with Hendrickson’s cherubic face, curly blonde hair and perennially flushed cheeks.

Walter isn’t the only one keeping Marjorie company—her daughter Tess (Susan Kulp) and son-in-law Jon (Marty Tucker) drop in to take care of her, Tess expressing a near-constant skepticism of new technology that we feel to the core. It's this character who feels, deeply, that which the holograms cannot—an unspeakable gulf between her and her mother that no memory can bridge.

It’s a world that is creepily close to our own—a techno dystopia not unlike that in Spike Jonze’s 2013 Her, in which technology is an imperfect remedy to human loneliness. As the play tumbles forward in time, both Walter Prime and Tess and John get a kind of pseudo-human company isn’t so far from the omnipresent Macbooks, iPhones and Androids, and artificial intelligence that now dominate our daily interactions in the year 2019.

Marjorie Prime, later drafts of which were a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for drama, is not a perfect play. Not unlike Tom Kitt’s attempt to songify manic depression in Next To Normal, Harrison’s notions of grief and trauma reduce one character to stereotype, his depiction of the gay kid who just couldn’t deal becoming the George Downes who never was. Occasionally, his language is overwrought, maudlin and far-flung, as if Harrison was searching for a judicious editor that he never found.

But the bones of the play work—understatement is in fact its greatest and most haunting asset—and in EBM’s small black box theater it comes alive. As the script hurtles forward and the primes multiply, cast members stir up in us a gumbo of anxieties—about how we create and recreate our own memories, what is left of them after we have left this universe for another, what becomes of the technology that will inevitably outlive us.

Mann gives a particularly masterful performance, shape-shifting in the most subtle of ways as she goes from a woman unstuck in time to a woman who is not really a woman at all. Both she and Hendrickson have nailed a careful, calculated study in movement, deeply human at some points and somewhat animatronic in others.

Hendrickson, in particular, shows the omnipresence of technology with the mere turn of his chin. It’s the logical, somewhat horrifying evolution of a tech-enabled surveillance state—that moment where Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden thinks the National Security Administration is spying on him during sex, or the growing suspicion that Facebook and Alexa take just as much time listening in as they do providing services for their users.

Kulp, meanwhile, gives a heartrending performance as Marjorie’s middle-aged daughter, whose skepticism toward technology—and that technology itself—outlives her. While Hendrickson and Mann chill and tickle us as a sort of technological warning, Kulp cuts to the fleshy, bright heart of the emotion of which only humans are capable.

Around the cast, Williams has made a series of staging choices makes the play shine very brightly. With an assist from stage manager Stacy Lupo, he has essentially created two sets in one place: a living room with a couch, cozy chairs and tables, and a back wall that is ominously lit with cones of flickering neon light on exposed brick. It’s new and old at the same time, like a airport charging station circa 2050, left in the basement of a dingy old building.

The work is scored by not only by Vivaldi and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—both of them “old” music by the play’s standard—but also Janelle Monae’s sublime Electric Lady, a sweeping Afrofuturist opera of a work that picks up where Metropolis and The ArchAndroid leave us hanging. 

In the audience, it is impossible not to reflect on the intervention of technology on our own lives. Yes, we see the very human parts of ourselves—the parent or grandparent that we took care of and miss achingly, and the weight that a child's death will have until the bitter end —but emerge more interested in what we are already forgetting with the overwhelming presence of technology.

By the time the lights—all of them—go down, we’ve started to compile a catalogue of our own actions. Did we kiss our kids, our parents, or partners this morning when we woke up—or did we check email instead? Who are those people who look like us, but happier, living their lives on Instagram? If we are struck dead on our way home, what final Facebook status will live online forever? Do we spend more time texting with our friends or talking to them? When was the last time family dinner took precedence over Fortnite? Or when family dinner existed without the presence of smartphones?

Did we do enough to leave a real mark, or merely a semblance of ourselves?

Performances of Marjorie Prime run at 8 p.m. March 7-9 at EBM Vintage, located at 845 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven. Tickets and more information are available at New Haven Theater Company’s website.