The title of Jordan Harrison’s new play receiving its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons feels genteel, like a late afternoon stroll through the Greco-Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But then consider its full title: A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities. You see, the museum-goers in this foreboding drama aren’t looking at famous paintings or ancient urns. They’re looking at us. Because, as is made clear, we’re no longer around anymore, having been replaced by artificial intelligence.
The playwright has long been fascinated by the topic, as demonstrated by his acclaimed Marjorie Prime, a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist seen at the same theater and later turned into a film starring Jon Hamm and Lois Smith. In that work, an elderly woman suffering from dementia finds comfort interacting with an artificial version of her late husband. In The Antiquities — a co-production of Playwrights Horizons, the Vineyard Theater and the Goodman Theatre —Harrison delivers a series of vignettes, spanning centuries, depicting how mankind became extinct through its own hubris.
In the opening scene, two women (at least they look like women) welcome us by saying, with no small amount of irony, to “look alive.”
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
“We know that humans had museums themselves, for understanding the dinosaurs,” they explain. “Well, now they are the dinosaurs. Maybe, in trying to understand them, we can better understand ourselves.”
What follows is a series of short scenes dubbed “exhibits” and each labeled with a digital stamp announcing the year. The first one is set in 1816, providing an early, albeit fictional, example of the negative ramifications of humans attempting to create life. We watch as Mary Shelley, endeavoring to entertain such friends as Lord Byron during a holiday at Lake Geneva, relates her tale of Dr. Frankenstein and his ill-fated creature.
Later, in an exhibit set in 1978, we’re introduced to an engineer exulting in his invention of a robot to a skeptical bartender. “It’s life, I created life!” he announces, sounding eerily like Victor Frankenstein. In another set in 1994, we watch as a father, mother, and their young son log onto the internet for the first time (the wheezing, whirring sounds of which prompted nostalgic laughter among the older audience members). In 2008, a young woman attempts to explain the internet to her grandfather and helps him record an outgoing message for his new iPhone.
But as the play moves forward into the future, things turn much darker. By 2031, human actors are augmenting their bodies, and even their brains, to better compete with digital performers. By 2076, humans are struggling to survive their battle against the “inorganics.” And in 2240, a man proposes sex to a woman not for pleasure, but to keep the human race alive (it proves pleasurable anyway).
One of the play’s more chilling scenes is also its simplest: it depicts “The Reliquary,” in which objects associated with the long-gone humans, including a rotary phone, teddy bear, butter churn, and clarinet, are on display in glass cases.
The play’s episodic structure results in inevitable choppiness, with some vignettes landing harder than others. The back-and-forth chronology, with later scenes sometimes bookending earlier ones, can prove confusing. But under the precise direction of David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, The Antiquities proves a provocative cautionary tale, not that one was needed, about how we may not always be able to fully control the technology that seems to be advancing with dizzying speed. The writing is consistently clever, such as the tiny mistakes the characters sometimes make when emulating human behavior that they never experienced firsthand.
Nine performers — Cindy Cheung, Marchant Davis, Layan Elwazani, Andrew Garman, Julius Rinzel, Aria Shahghasemi, Kristen Sieh, Ryan Spahn, and Amerlia Workman — skillfully embody a wide variety of roles. And the production looks terrific, with Tyler Micoleau’s piercing lighting design and Paul Steinberg’s versatile scenic design, featuring walls that seem to appear and disappear in the lightning-fast scene changes, providing a futuristic sheen to the ominous proceedings.
The Antiquities opened February 4, 2025, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through February 23. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
