Due to a campfire on the coast of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take on the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her warning story (soon a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster Sentience reaches and then runs wildly. Her friend Lord Byron is so crazy that his immediate, grinning reaction – “you are demented” – quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.
“May we never be smart enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.
Only 424 years later, in 2240, two after the human beings look back on that vignette and the entire anthropocene, with wonder and compassion. How could people consider themselves the end point of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorical, when humanity clearly just “a transition type” and “a blip on the timeline”?
That timeline is the mandatory as somewhat preserving structural device by Jordan Harrison's game 'The Antiquities', which was opened on Tuesday in the horizon of theater scriptures. Starting with Shelley's Monster (which she calls counterfactual a “computer”) and ends with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary story competition itself, because it maps a possible route, Via Technologica, From romantic glory to to types of fall.
Because the Inorganica of 2240 are here not to praise humanity, but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibit” in what the alternative title of the piece “calls a tour of the permanent collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities”. The Shelley scene is the first of 12 of such exhibitions, which demonstrates how inventions gradually catch up natural intelligence and then, just like the Frankenstein sample, destroyed it.
In the beginning, the inventions seem useful or harmless or – for us, in the middle of the timeline – hopelessly outdated. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy who was injured in a workshop accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off with an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The man who satisfies De Nerd is impressed.) In 1987 a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) fails to let him look one of her soap, recorded on that magical but soon Quick -discussed technology, the Betamax video band.
Some of these scenes are beautifully drawn, with the humor, marrow and undercurrent of sorrow that is characteristic of Harrison's best work. (The chances and dangers of AI as human companions were the subject of his piece 'Marjorie Prime', a Pulitzer -finalist in 2015.) The boy who gets the prosthetic finger is left in the workshop because his family can no longer pay him . (Father to Son: “Well. Goodbye, Tom. I don't expect me to see you again.”) The reason that the boy from 1987 is mourning, his single Uncle was buried that day. We don't have to hear what he died of.
But other scenes, such as a scenes in 2076, when the last people live like outlaws in a dystopia of semi-robot rulers, feel more like place fillers, necessary as steps in Harrison's timeline but not fascinating in themselves. Others are hardly throwing away, gloomy Vaudeville sketches that make a point and make Black -out.
Because of this discontinuity of time and character – the nine fine actors play 45 rolls – “the antiques” is not cumulative in the usual sense, in which behavior and consequence are connected within the limits of a life, an hour or even a moment. On the contrary, as soon as we care about someone, someone is eradicated.
I mean by the playwright, but of course every person is sniffed in the play and otherwise in a more literal sense. This is useful when emphasizing the theme of mortality, both on personal and on the geological scales, so that you will think less about the value of a life than about life forms. Perhaps the most terrible line of the piece is spoken by a writer (Amelia Workman) who by 2031 – only six years from there! – can no longer compete on the market with AI
'If they can do everything that makes me me“She asks,” what is the use of me? “
Although this character disappears from the story a little later, Harrison did not leave his game behind with nothing to keep it together. Where characters are volatile, ideas and images come back, often about long pieces. Many scenes are linked by references to earlier, such as structural Easter eggs. We meet Percy Shelley – Mary's husband – in the first scene of the campfire; In the second, almost a century later, we hear a woman struggling to read his' ode to the west 'wind'. An AI device that is considering implanting a character in 2032 is implanted in everyone in 2076.
The logic is therefore less narrative than poetic – or to say it differently, it is software, not hardware. If that is a daring choice, it spectacularly pays from about two -thirds of the road through the 95 minutes of the piece. As the timeline comes to its apparent end, our guides introduce us to a special exhibition, in contrast to the others.
This is a reliquary of human technology, unveiled in a scene that suggests how future creatures, such as paleontologists derive those huge dinosaurs from small bones, get so much wrong. Despite all their brain power, they interpret pert shampoo as a soft drink, clarinets such as medical instruments, betamaxing as a kind of treasure that requires cooling.
Excellent moments such as that, hilarious and burning, the characteristic not only carries Harrison, but also from David Cromer, who directed “the Antiquities” with Caitlin Sullivan. Everything is perfectly rated on maximum effect without exaggeration: the matte metal panels (sets of Paul Steinberg), the museum-case lighting (by Tyler Micoleau), the sociologically determined costumes (by Brenda Abandandolo), The Creepy Sound (by Christopher Darbassie) And especially the props (by Matt Carlin).
Although extremely minimal, and always tastefully modest, it all looks like a million dollar-dareom, it might be why the piece is a three-way COPRODUCTION, with stage writers and the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Goodman Theater in Chicago.
But by never going too far, it may be that “the antiques” do not go far enough. The last third part, that I will not spoil, our view of the timeline is smart, but tensions to justify themselves. As far as it does, it is in the old -fashioned way that the rest of the piece has fired so often: by trying to involve us in people as lively, meaningful individuals, not only as awkward carriers of a dying intelligence.
In the process, Harrison's play seems to be the natural desire to survive, feel and cause it – discover, to mourn, enjoy and create – with a kind of recklessness that, just like global warming , inevitably lead to extinction. Was the betamax the fault? Was Mary Shelley's vision? “The Antiquities” is finally less a memorial than a moral game. That may not be wrong, but it is only half the story.
Antiquities
Up to and including 23 February at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; Playwright horizons.org. Duration: 1 hour 35 minutes.
