By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.
“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.
A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?
That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.
For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.
At first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.
Some of these scenes are beautifully drawn, with the wit, pith and undercurrent of sadness characteristic of Harrison’s best work. (The opportunities and perils of A.I. as human companions were the subject of his play “Marjorie Prime,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2015.) The boy who gets the prosthetic finger is left at the workhouse because his family can no longer afford him. (Father to son: “Well. Goodbye, Tom. I don’t expect I’ll see you again.”) The reason the 1987 boy is grieving is that his bachelor uncle was buried that day. We don’t need to be told what he died of.
But other scenes, like one set in 2076, when the last humans live as outlaws in a dystopia of semi-robot overlords, feel more like place fillers, necessary as steps in Harrison’s timeline but not compelling in themselves. Others are barely throwaways, bleak vaudeville sketches that make a point and black out.
Because of this discontinuity of time and character — the nine fine actors play 45 roles — “The Antiquities” is not cumulative in the usual sense, in which behavior and consequence are connected within the confines of a life, an hour or even an instant. Rather, as soon as we care about someone, that someone is snuffed out.
I mean by the playwright, but of course every human, in the play and otherwise, is snuffed out in a more literal sense too. This is useful in highlighting the theme of mortality, both on the personal and geological scales, directing you to think less about the value of a life than of life-forms. Perhaps the play’s most dreadful line is spoken by a writer (Amelia Workman) who by 2031 — just six years hence! — can no longer compete in the market with A.I.
“If they can do everything that makes me me,” she asks, “then what’s the point of me?”
Though this character disappears from the story a moment later, Harrison has not left his play with nothing to hold it together. Where characters are fleeting, ideas and images recur, often across long 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; in the second, nearly a century later, we hear a woman struggling to read his “Ode to the West Wind.” An A.I. device one character considers implanting in 2032 is implanted in everyone by 2076.
The logic, then, is less narrative than poetic — or to put it another way, it is software not hardware. If that’s a daring choice, it pays off spectacularly about two-thirds of the way through the play’s 95 minutes. As the timeline comes to its apparent end, our guides introduce us to a special exhibit, unlike the others.
This is a reliquary of human technology, revealed in a scene that suggests how future beings, like paleontologists inferring huge dinosaurs from tiny bones, get so much wrong. For all their brainpower, they misconstrue Pert shampoo as a soft drink, clarinets as medical instruments, Betamaxes as some kind of treasure requiring refrigeration.
Exquisite moments like that, hilarious and scalding, bear the hallmark not only of Harrison but also of David Cromer, who directed “The Antiquities” with Caitlin Sullivan. Everything is perfectly judged for maximum effect without overstatement: the matte metal panels (sets by Paul Steinberg), the museum-case lighting (by Tyler Micoleau), the sociologically pinpoint costumes (by Brenda Abbandandolo), the creepy sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and especially the props (by Matt Carlin).
Though extremely minimal, and always tastefully restrained, it all looks like a million bucks — which may be why the play is a three-way co-production, with Playwrights and the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Goodman Theater in Chicago.
But in never going too far it may be that “The Antiquities” does not go far enough. Its last third, which I won’t spoil, revises our view of the timeline cleverly but strains to justify itself. To the extent it does, it’s in the old-fashioned way that the rest of the play has so often abjured: by trying to engage us with humans as vivid, meaningful individuals, not merely as awkward bearers of a dying intelligence.
In the process, Harrison’s play seems to equate the natural desire to survive, to feel and to matter — to discover, to mourn, to enjoy and create — with a kind of hubris that, like global warming, will lead inevitably to extinction. Was the Betamax to blame? Was Mary Shelley’s vision? “The Antiquities” is finally less a memorial than a morality pageant. That may not be wrong but it’s only half the story.
The Antiquities
Through Feb. 23 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
