By Lucy Komisar
This is the most pretentious and boring show I’ve seen in years, sometimes seeming to last as long as the span of years 1816 to 2240 when the actions take place. For a science fiction play about artificial intelligence, it is utterly devoid of imagination.
The audience is first addressed by characters who tells them they are in the Late Human Age. They turn out to be Mary Shelley (Kristen Sieh), who will marry poet Percy Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Amelia Workman), pregnant with the baby of a giggly poet George Gordon Byron (not explained). Not mentioned is that Mary will write the 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” a Gothic science fiction that was a book with plot, characters and original ideas. Alas, the play that follows has none.
Perhaps the writer Jordan Harrison is aware that these days, in an age of Instagram, many people have shortened attention spans. I counted 16 scenes in the 100 minutes, about 6 minutes a scene. And the plot and characters in succeeding scenes are unconnected, though some occasionally reappear.
Following the photos provided to critics, those six minutes include the Mary Shelley moment, Stuart (Ryan Spahn) in 1978 telling a bartender (Workman) of the wonderful machine he has invented (all about 1s and 0s), [she says are you a fag, because he looked at her eyes not at her breasts], Joslyn (Sieh) and son Noah Julius Rinzel) talking about life and death, especially of his uncle Stuart.
And then a family (Andrew Garman, Workman and Rinzel) in 1994 gazing at an early computer:
FATHER. We could ask it something.
MOTHER. Ask it something?
She’s never googled anything in her life.
FATHER. Something you want to know.
MOTHER. And it knows? We just took it out of the box.
FATHER. It’s connected to all the other computers, all over the country, so it knows everything they do.
The mother leans in toward the computer.
MOTHER. Will I ever go to Paris?
BOY. Mom.
MOTHER. What?
BOY. That’s not how computers think.
Do you find that dialogue brilliant? I didn’t.
Less than 30 years later, in 2023 an AI tech (Layan Elwazani) has been fired for issuing a warning about AI’s dangers and with an attorney (Cindy Cheung) is talking with the lawyer (Garman) for the corporation that wants to buy her off for $20 million. She proposes $350 million.
That’s it. No development of how this happened. No interaction with other workers. No “should I throw the world under the bus for a lot of cash?” Just an Instagram moment.
Perhaps attempting to arouse the audience, Harrison or his directors put in two orgasmic oral sex events, one man-on-woman (under her voluminous 2240 skirts, she is churning butter as society has regressed), another man-on-man (face against fly, against Stuart, we are already told he is “a fag”). Gross, gratuitous and unnecessary to the narrative.
The man on woman text says: WOMAN. So, you wanna fuck me to save the human race.
YOUNG MAN. (Worth a try.) Yeah?
WOMAN. This is the end. Don’t you know that? Nothing’s gonna change that. We
had our time. Stomped across the world like it was ours. Now it’s theirs. And soon
we’ll be gone.
YOUNG MAN. But we’re here now.
She looks at him. A feeling like they’re going to fuck after all.
Lights.
So not clear if the crude oral sex was the choice of the directors or the playwright, who think they can’t get audience’s attention without softcore porn. (Yech!)
At the end, moving back to 2076, humans are hunkered down in a safe house hiding from the AI “inorganics” that have taken over the world. One them (Elwazani) wants to escape their surveillance through removal of the “node” implanted in her neck. Done with a knife and a scream of pain. (Today’s humans don’t need nodes. U.S. intelligence is very good at surveilling our phones and emails.)
The actors are fine, and directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan manage the vignettes, which is not very demanding since they are static. Except for the gross oral sex. Cromer and Sullivan, was this your choice, doesn’t the play work without actors sucking on peoples’ privates?
And Mary Shelley? When we return to 1816, she talks about her “Frankenstein.” “Victor called the new life a monster because he was scared of it. But its real name was Computer…That was the name it would give itself one day, for there was no limit to what it could do with its mind.” Of course, Frankenstein’s monster attacked his creator and killed him.
I think I know how this play was created. Unlike Mary Shelley, playwright Harrison threw a bunch of dates and events (invention of first computer, warnings that AI threatens society) at an AI writing app and this is what came out. It may work for Instagram, but not for the theater.
“The Antiquities.” Written by Jordan Harrison, directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan. Playwrights Horizons, 216 East 42nd Street, NYC. Runtime 100 minutes. Opened Feb 4, 2025, closes March 2, 2025.