By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, 5 associates take up the problem of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, along with her cautionary story (quickly to be a novel) of an obsessed physician whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his quick, sneering response — “you’re demented” — rapidly turns right into a shiver and a prayer.
“Could we by no means be intelligent sufficient to create one thing that may change us,” he says.
A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look again on that vignette, and the entire of the Anthropocene, with surprise and pity. How may folks have considered themselves because the endpoint of evolution, one in all these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was clearly simply “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?
That timeline is the compelling if considerably overbearing structural gadget of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Beginning with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “laptop”) and ending with, nicely, the tip of humanity, it may win a scary-story contest itself, because it maps one potential route, the By way of Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.
For the inorganics of 2240 are right here to not reward mankind however to bury it. They’re guides to “displays” in what the play’s different title calls “A Tour of the Everlasting Assortment within the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the primary of 12 such displays, demonstrating how innovations regularly overtook pure intelligence after which, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.
At first, the innovations appear helpful or innocent or — to us, smack in the midst of the timeline — hopelessly out of date. A girl in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wood finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) reveals off a clumsy robotic prototype that acknowledges 400 English phrases. (The man who’s pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mom (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) can not sleep agrees to let him watch one in all her soaps, recorded on that magical but soon-to-be-discontinued know-how, the Betamax videotape.
A few of these scenes are superbly drawn, with the wit, pith and undercurrent of unhappiness attribute of Harrison’s greatest work. (The alternatives and perils of A.I. as human companions had been the topic of his play “Marjorie Prime,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2015.) The boy who will get the prosthetic finger is left on the workhouse as a result of his household can not afford him. (Father to son: “Properly. Goodbye, Tom. I don’t count on I’ll see you once more.”) The explanation the 1987 boy is grieving is that his bachelor uncle was buried that day. We don’t should be informed what he died of.
However different scenes, like one set in 2076, when the final people stay as outlaws in a dystopia of semi-robot overlords, really feel extra like place fillers, crucial as steps in Harrison’s timeline however not compelling in themselves. Others are barely throwaways, bleak vaudeville sketches that make a degree and black out.
Due to this discontinuity of time and character — the 9 fantastic actors play 45 roles — “The Antiquities” just isn’t cumulative within the typical sense, during which conduct and consequence are related inside the confines of a life, an hour and even an immediate. Fairly, as quickly as we care about somebody, that somebody is snuffed out.
I imply by the playwright, however after all each human, within the play and in any other case, is snuffed out in a extra literal sense too. That is helpful in highlighting the theme of mortality, each on the private and geological scales, directing you to suppose much less in regards to the worth of a life than of life-forms. Maybe the play’s most dreadful line is spoken by a author (Amelia Workman) who by 2031 — simply six years therefore! — can not compete available in the market with A.I.
“If they’ll do the whole lot that makes me me,” she asks, “then what’s the purpose of me?”
Although this character disappears from the story a second later, Harrison has not left his play with nothing to carry it collectively. The place characters are fleeting, concepts and pictures recur, typically throughout lengthy stretches. Many scenes are linked by references to earlier ones, like structural Easter eggs. We meet Percy Shelley — Mary’s husband — in that first scene by the campfire; within the second, almost a century later, we hear a lady struggling to learn his “Ode to the West Wind.” An A.I. gadget one character considers implanting in 2032 is implanted in everybody by 2076.
The logic, then, is much less narrative than poetic — or to place it one other manner, it’s software program not {hardware}. If that’s a daring alternative, it pays off spectacularly about two-thirds of the best way via the play’s 95 minutes. Because the timeline involves its obvious finish, our guides introduce us to a particular exhibit, not like the others.
This can be a reliquary of human know-how, revealed in a scene that means how future beings, like paleontologists inferring big dinosaurs from tiny bones, get a lot flawed. For all their brainpower, they misconstrue Pert shampoo as a gentle drink, clarinets as medical devices, Betamaxes as some sort of treasure requiring refrigeration.
Beautiful moments like that, hilarious and scalding, bear the hallmark not solely of Harrison but additionally of David Cromer, who directed “The Antiquities” with Caitlin Sullivan. All the things is completely judged for max impact with out overstatement: the matte steel panels (units by Paul Steinberg), the museum-case lighting (by Tyler Micoleau), the sociologically pinpoint costumes (by Brenda Abbandandolo), the creepy sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and particularly the props (by Matt Carlin).
Although extraordinarily minimal, and all the time tastefully restrained, all of it appears to be like like one million bucks — which can be why the play is a three-way co-production, with Playwrights and the Winery Theater in New York and the Goodman Theater in Chicago.
However in by no means going too far it could be that “The Antiquities” doesn’t go far sufficient. Its final third, which I gained’t spoil, revises our view of the timeline cleverly however strains to justify itself. To the extent it does, it’s within the old school manner that the remainder of the play has so typically abjured: by attempting to have interaction us with people as vivid, significant people, not merely as awkward bearers of a dying intelligence.
Within the course of, Harrison’s play appears to equate the pure need to outlive, to really feel and to matter — to find, to mourn, to get pleasure from and create — with a sort of hubris that, like world warming, will lead inevitably to extinction. Was the Betamax in charge? Was Mary Shelley’s imaginative and prescient? “The Antiquities” is lastly much less a memorial than a morality pageant. That might not be flawed however it’s solely half the story.
The Antiquities
By Feb. 23 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Operating time: 1 hour 35 minutes.