Broadway's ‘Marjorie Prime’ explores the complex circuitry of a family

June Squibb, Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein, and Christopher Lowell share how the play's futuristic, high-tech themes actually advance a deeply human story.

Summary

• Marjorie Prime is a play about an aging woman who uses a hologram of her late husband to regain her memories
• The Broadway production stars June Squibb; Cynthia Nixon; Danny Burstein; and Christopher Lowell
• The cast; playwright Jordan Harrison; and director Anne Kauffman discuss how the play is mainly a family drama with futuristic themes

Move over, Siri. Jordan Harrison’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist Marjorie Prime, now on Broadway at the Hayes Theater, imagines a new kind of virtual assistant — one designed to help us remember.

Is it sci-fi? Yes and no. Set in the near future, the play deals with holographic humans and artificial intelligence, but at its core, it is about the delicate circuitry of family. Just ask its cast — June Squibb, Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein, and Christopher Lowell — who all said the technology is just a lens for something deeply human.

“There is an AI factor to it all, of course,” said Burstein, a Tony Award winner (Moulin Rouge! The Musical) who plays the title character’s son-in-law, Jon. “But it’s really this beautiful family drama where people have to deal with their past in order to make their future a better one.”

First seen in L.A. and then off Broadway in a decade ago, Marjorie Prime now marks Harrison’s Broadway debut. It begins with 86-year-old widow Marjorie (Squibb) dealing with dementia. Walter (Lowell), a high-tech hologram called a Prime who looks like her late husband at age 30, is programmed to patch holes in her fraying memory.

The family relationships in the play pulled 96-year-old Oscar nominee Squibb back to Broadway, where she made her debut in 1960 in Gypsy and last was seen six years ago in Waitress.

Marjorie’s loved ones give her Walter Prime because “they feel it might help her remember things if she talks to him about the past,” Squibb said. “They feed the information to him. Sometimes it surprises Marjorie, what he’s talking about.”

And there, the playwright’s inspired twist comes in: Primes only know what they’re fed, which presents a dilemma: Should we edit our own histories to make them prettier?

Nixon, a Tony winner for Rabbit Hole and The Little Foxes, plays Marjorie’s daughter Tess. She was drawn to the play’s varied angles on a single family — from the practical challenges of caring for an aging parent to the fact that everyone's story holds the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For Marjorie, Tess, and Jon, that truth raises a provocative question. “What is the narrative that our family embraces?” said Nixon. “Is it the warts-and-all version where terrible things happen, maybe people behave badly, or is it the anesthetized, cleaned-up, sanitized version where everybody loves each other and everybody was always kind?”

After all, if you leave out the rough stuff, the story is incomplete. AI adds a whole other dimension to how families handle life and death. “When someone is gone, do you accept, as humans have for thousands of years, that they are gone?” Nixon continued. “Or is there a way to reclaim part of them and still be in a relationship with them?”

Marjorie Prime posed the same queries when Lois Smith played the title role off Broadway in 2015 and two years later in the film adaptation opposite Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, and Tim Robbins. But over the past decade, AI-driven machines, assistants, and even actors have advanced. An ad for technology uncannily similar to Harrison's Primes even went viral days before the revival's Broadway performances began.

“The wild thing about coming back to this play 10 years later is how much the world has changed,” said Harrison. “When we first premiered it at Playwrights Horizons [off Broadway], it was a little bit fantastical to have an AI being in your house. Now your kid talks to your Alexa, or your spouse has an AI therapist. It's emotionally immediate for the audience in a new way.”

Director Anne Kauffman, who also staged the Off-Broadway run, echoed that sentiment. “The great thing about coming back to the play is realizing how prescient Jordan was,” she said. “Also the fact that it basically remains a story about a family and the emotional relationships and grief.”

While Lowell (Cult of Love) occupies the role of a machine, he also marveled in what Marjorie Prime says about how both families and technology operate.

“Even though AI is so much a part of the play, it really is a play about human connection and the lengths we go through to try and bridge the gaps between ourselves and the people we love most,” he said. “It’s a magic trick that Jordan pulled off in the writing.”

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Gillian Russo contributed reporting for this story.