In “The Antiquities,” playwright Jordan Harrison offers a dozen stories about the downside of technology through the ages, each from a distinctive year, from 1816 to 2240. If the play can feel like a dramatized essay at times, Harrison has something intelligent to say about technology in general and Artificial Intelligence in particular, which he has been exploring theatrically for at least a decade (in Marjorie Prime, in 2015 also at Playwrights Horizons, the characters are living with holograms of their deceased loved ones.) And many of the individual stories in “The Antiquities” work well on their own – funny, pointed, haunting…up to a point.
“Imagine we’re actually here in these seats in this room in the Late Human age,” a woman (Kristen Sieh) says to us in the first scene. “Imagine you have a body.” She and another woman (Amelia Workman) are dressed in 19thcentury finery, but these are clearly costumes. They set out for us the premise that ties together the disparate scenes that follow: Human beings, now extinct, are being presented in a museum setting by Earth’s now-dominant inhabitants, as part of “A Tour Of The Permanent Collection In The Museum Of Late Human Antiquities” – which is the alternative title of the play. And who are these inhabitants? Call them computers, or Artificial Intelligence, or “inorganics,” which is what humans fighting them call them in a scene that takes place in 2076. They are the descendants of human technology, which seems in this play almost indistinguishable from human folly.
“The humans had a complex civilization, responsible for many technological innovations,” we’re told in voiceover a bit more than halfway through the play, as the stage displays items that we’ve seen in use during the previous scenes, such as a rotary phone, a 1994 personal computer and modem, a flip phone, an early generation iPhone. “These artifacts represent what we believe are some of the proudest achievements of the Late Human era. A window into this once vast society. They are prosthetics, of a sort – intended to make the owner more powerful, more intelligent, more efficient, more immortal. More like us.”
It’s a barbed satire of both Natural History museums (especially the dinosaur exhibits) and of the generally ignorant and patronizing attitude we take towards prehistoric civilizations. After this scene, however, “The Antiquities” started to try my patience.
Up to this point, the nine cast members, each portraying up to six characters, have performed in a series of intriguing, largely disconnected scenes that progress chronologically. In 1816, Mary Shelley is at a campfire with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, about to tell the story that would become Frankenstein.
In 1910, a worker named Dinah tells us she lost two fingers in a factory machine. “It works faster than me, is the trouble. They said, It’ll be easier, it’ll do the work for you, it’ll serve you. Now I serve it.”
In 1978, a nerdy engineer named Stuart boasts in a bar of having created “a multidirectional cart, a robot on wheels” that has finally learned how to avoid bumping into the furniture. “The point is it learns. It gets better, all by itself,” He says in wonderment: “One day your car is gonna drive you around, and you’ll think it’s nothing. One day you’ll swallow a pill that will perform surgery on your heart. A non-organic being will land on an airless planet and build a house there for you. A non-organic being will raise your kids for you.”
The following scene takes place in 1987, and Stuart’s sister and nephew talk about his dying from AIDS – these two scenes the only ones that are dramatically (rather than just thematically) connected in the first half. The juxtaposition helps drives home the idea that our fascination with technology is in part an urge toward immortality — an urge that is doomed.
In 1994, we see a father, mother and son (Andrew Garman, Amelia Workman, Julius Rinzel) staring at the light of a computer as we hear the familiar clicks and whines of the AOL dial-up modem (which gets a huge laugh from the audience.)
In 2014, we see three tech bros trying to find the perfect Alexa-like voice. In 2023, a fired employee at an AI company is at a meeting between their lawyer and her own, resisting the money they want to give her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “Doesn’t anybody get it? I’m telling you I made this thing, I helped make this thing, and now… We’re the dinosaurs. We’re the dinosaurs and this is the meteor.”
There are then three increasingly dystopian scenes in the future, before the one displaying the artifacts.After that, “The Antiquities” backtracks, going back to the previous stories and finishing them up. This is surely well-meaning, an effort to give us fuller stories rather than just a theme, and some of the individual stories do wrap up in a satisfying way. But it all started to feel too much. “The Antiquities,” which imagines a future in which human beings are no longer welcome by the creatures they created, started to outwear its own.
The Antiquities
Playwrights Horizons through February 23. Extended to March 2.
Co-produced with the Vineyard Theatre and the Goodman Theatre
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission.
Tickets: $62.50 – $102.50
Written by Jordan Harrison
Co-directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan
Scenic design by Paul Steinberg, costume design by Brenda Abbandandolo, lighting design by Tyler Micoleau, sound design by Christopher Darbassie, wig and hair design by Leah Loukas, dramaturg Sarah Lunnie, SFX consultant Jeremy Chernick. Stage management: Erin Gioia Albrecht.
Cast: Cindy Cheung (Woman 3), Marchánt Davis (Man 2,) Layan Elwazani (Woman 4), Andrew Garman (Man 3), Aria Shahghasemi (Man 1), Kristen Sieh (Woman 1), Ryan Spahn (Man 4), Julius Rinzel (Boy),Amelia Workman (Woman 2)
