Is the line blurring between human and artificial intelligence? Jordan Harrison’s play “Marjorie Prime” – receiving its area premiere at Olney Theatre Center– straddles that line.
Marjorie is an 85-year-old with increasing memory loss. Her husband, Walter, died 10 years ago. Modern science hasn’t found a way to bring him back. But it’s come pretty close.
Marjorie shares her home with a carbon copy of Walter -- at age 30. Walter’s artificial doppelganger, which is called a “prime,” looks surprisingly lifelike, although, as played by Michael Glenn, he moves and speaks stiffly. When he’s not talking to Marjorie, he sits motionless in a chair off to the side -- his head lowered, his eyes fixed on the floor.
Marjorie’s grown daughter, Tess, is skeptical about this whole prime thing. Tess’ husband, Jon – played by Michael Willis -- tries to persuade her that the prime helps her mother with her memory and provides company. It’s almost human.
But skeptical as Tess is, in the second part of the play she’s the one who needs the comfort of talking to a prime. Only this time it’s a prime of her mother – “Marjorie Prime.”
In the title role, Kathleen Butler’s Marjorie conveys greater warmth as a prime than she did as a human. Even so, Tess isn’t comfortable talking to a prime. She tries to figure the prime out by asking whether it has emotions, whether it feels anything.
The prime answers that it wants to know more, to be “better.” “You like to be more human,” says Julie-Ann Elliott’s chilly Tess, who seems more analytical than the machinery she’s talking to. “You want to be more human, too,” the prime responds, in a moment of surprising insight.
Tess’ attempts to understand the way the prime works, like Tess’s husband’s explanations early on, help us understand the central device the playwright has created.
But there are still gaps in logic, particularly in the final scene, which I won’t spoil here. Is this scene imaginary? If not, where and how does it take place? A special effect suggesting snow, or maybe feathers, or little slips of paper descends on the scene, making it even more confusing.
Jason Loewith’s direction navigates the tricky terrain separating the human and artificial characters. And Misha Kachman has designed a stunning set – a modern, glass-and-stone living room overlooking the woods. But it’s unclear whether this is an assisted living facility or a fancy condo, which later becomes Tess and Jon’s home. Either way, the family’s well off. How else could they afford a prime?
They never quite seem like a family, though. That may be partly the playwright’s point. Years earlier, this family suffered a major tragedy that is revealed in the course of the play. Can technology help with wounds that refuse to heal.
There’s a science-fiction, Stepford Wives element to “Marjorie Prime.” The Frankenstein-like notion of a robot becoming human also surfaced in Thomas Gibbons’ “Uncanny Valley,” produced at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, two summers ago.
It’s a creepy subject – in “Frankenstein,” in “Uncanny Valley” and certainly in “Marjorie Prime,” which is being made into a Hollywood movie. Creepiness, however, isn’t the only reason “Marjorie Prime” is unsettling. For a play about the feelings and memories that make us human, “Marjorie Prime” winds up being more stimulating intellectually than emotionally.
J. Wynn Rousuck