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It is sometime in the 2050s. Marjorie and her companion — a facsimile of her late husband Walter as a young man, share a conversation in which Walter is appealing, charismatic, showmanly, obsequious, and just a bit off. When Tess and Jon introduce themselves later, visiting Marjorie and taking care of her, Walter withdraws. He sits pleasantly and unobtrusively in teal light, watching the other players with rapt attention as he, the machine intended to learn how to be the man he has replaced, absorbs every word, memory, affect, and behavior of the people he was provided to comfort.
In Marjorie Prime — running at the New Haven Theater Company on Chapel Street through March 9 — Tess (Susan Kulp) is a mother in middle-age, trying valiantly to connect with her dying mother, Marjorie (Margaret Mann). Tess’s husband, Jon (Marty Tucker), is a generous and doting spouse with an optimistic approach to the latest technology in grieving comfortably, manifested in Walter Prime (Ryan Hendrickson). Walter, who was Tess’s father, appears as a dashing husband of 30 — how he once was not long after he and Marjorie married. The facsimile of Walter lives in Marjorie’s quarters where she is slowly losing her memories. He keeps her company, telling her stories, and learning facts about their life together.
The play confronts the audience with questions of existential relevance, fears and doubts. Why are we alive? What makes us human (or not human)? Do we live only to distract each other from our mortality?
New Haven Theater Company Board President Kevin Smith shared in the entryway of the theater that NHTC had started to pursue production rights for Marjorie Prime in the summer of 2017. The play’s director, Trevor Williams, expressed tremendous enthusiasm at their opportunity to stage it. Williams said that he was drawn to the project because of its non-human characters, calling to mind the story of Mephistopheles and Dr. Faustus, or the gods, demons, and spirits of classical theater who confront human characters with matters supernatural and alien. Williams said that he was excited to investigate the demons of our own making through the non-human characters in Marjorie Prime. The performers and the production do a great service to this dramatic lineage in the simple conversations that add up to 90 minutes of humorous, disturbing, and ultimately chilling drama.
Watching from the audience is like opening up a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man and having a long indictment of our faith in human artifice pop off of the page and into the theater. Tess and Jon are the middle-aged couples that today’s college students and young professionals could become. Marjorie is the shadow of a hard-nosed child of the 1970s, wrestling with the spectre of her own decline into Alzheimer’s. Walter — whose constant vigilance in scenes where he doesn’t speak directly to the other characters is a brilliant and disquieting device of live theater — is an entity parodying today’s bots, newsfeeds and automatic chatroom companions. He’s trying to be both the man that Marjorie buried just a few years before and the man as he was on the eve of a new millenium, and to Hendrickson’s credit, he misses both marks, obviously imperfect just often enough to be foreboding.
Through Kulp’s Tess, the skeptic in each of us is given a clear voice in the play, calling to attention the inherent absurdity of Walter’s presence. Kulp embodies with visceral passion and elegance somebody in desperate need of comfort and connection, who knows the devil when she meets it and isn’t about to be suckered. Out of all the human characters, Tucker’s Jon is the most prime-like — helpful, friendly, docile but pushy, just similar enough to Walter for the later contrast drawn between the characters to be more fulfilling. High praise to Mann for her performance as Marjorie: Through complex physical performance, vocal quality, and commitment to the illusion of the play, she provides a haunting and funny performance of human twilight with dignity, doing service to the indignity of Marjorie’s trials.
Thanks to a few concrete dates and nonfictional events referred to in the play, we can construct a poignant timeline for the lives of Marjorie and her family, even as it’s somewhat scrambled by the imperfections of the human characters’ memories — and the rigidity with which the (eventual) non-human characters adopt memories. Unraveling this thread of the play presents challenging quandaries on the nature of memory and identity that left this reviewer soundly disquieted.
This is a terrific production of a terrific play that calls its audiences to heed existential questions — and to search for our answers among other people.
Marjorie Prime runs at the New Haven Theater Company, in English Building Markets, 839 Chapel St., Mar. 1 and Mar. 2 and Mar. 7 through Mar. 9. Click here for tickets and more information.
