Marjorie Prime ★★★★★

In Marjorie Prime, June Squibb continues a grand theatrical tradition: actresses playing younger than their years. She’s 96, playing an 85-year-old.

And she’s killing it.

Not only is this remarkable nonagenarian opening a play on Broadway, she’s giving a heartbreaking performance as the titular Marjorie, a woman in the throes of dementia trying to make sense of her life as her memories flow in and out like an unruly tide. In addition to her daughter and son-in-law, she has a futuristic assistant: Walter Prime (Christopher Lowell, steadfastly believable), an AI projection representing her deceased husband as he was at 30. Walter’s job is to comfort Marjorie and help her remember the important parts of her life, such as the time they went to the movies to see Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding:

MARJORIE: Did I like it?

WALTER: You said you wanted a gay best friend afterwards.

MAJORIE: Did I get one?

WALTER: I’m afraid I don’t have that information.

When Marjorie Prime opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2015, it seemed like playwright Jordan Harrison was dipping his toes into science-fiction waters. Little did we know. Just a decade later, Harrison seems eerily prescient. In whirlwind fashion AI has become very much part of our lives, and not a fiction at all, which is perhaps why Second Stage has wisely decided it was time to put this masterful play on its biggest stage.

It’s all very accessible because Harrison is far more interested in emotional truths than technological gadgetry, and he has sculpted his mountain of ideas into what is on the surface a tidy family drama. Outer calmness often belies inner storms, however, and not everyone in Marjorie’s family is comfortable with the Primes. Tess (Cynthia Nixon), her daughter, articulates what many in the audience are now thinking:

TESS: Science fiction is here, Jonathan. Every day is science fiction. We buy these things that already know our moods and what we want for lunch even though we don’t know ourselves. And we listen to them, we do what we’re told. Or in this case we tell them our deepest secrets, even though we have no earthly idea how they work. We treat them like our loved ones.

Trying to keep the peace is Tess’s husband, Jon (Danny Burstein, terrific as always), but in addition to keeping Marjorie going, he has to keep his wife emotionally afloat, and she is sinking. Jon and Tess are both only 55, but Tess looks at her mother and can’t help obsessing on the downhill nature of aging despite advances in medicine and technology.

JON: We’re only halfway through our lives!

TESS: If we live to a hundred and ten!

JON: People live that long, healthy people.

TESS: Doesn’t it sound awful? Think of mom at eighty-six. A hundred and ten — what would be left?

As the play quietly jumps forward in time, devastations are softened, smoothed over by the Primes’ decisions to focus on the positive, often at the expense of the truth. With razor-sharp subtlety, Harrison proposes that AI doubles down on what the human brain does naturally in editing (or outright forgetting) the worst of the past in order to survive the present and carry on to another day.

Director Anne Kauffman teamed with Harrison on Marjorie Prime when it premiered in New York, which is perhaps why this production feels so utterly flawless. The show is only 90 minutes long, and every beat feels right; even the transitions move the narrative forward to its unforgettable conclusion.

And what performances she has elicited from her cast. Incredible as it is to say, Nixon, a lifelong theater veteran, has never been better, and her scenes with the marvelous Squibb resonate long after the ensemble has taken their curtain bows. This Marjorie Prime is the perfect artistic meeting of script, direction, design, and cast. Don’t miss it, readers, because it doesn’t get better than this.