urban excavations

Marjorie Prime
Featuring Danny Burstein, Christopher Lowell, Cynthia Nixon, June Squibb
Second Stage Theater at The Helen Hayes Theater
November 20, 2025 – February 15, 2026 [extension]
production site

The Broadway revival of 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist Marjorie Prime arrived with great starry fanfare and a bit of terrified recognition in early December, truly meeting its historical moment. If we are lucky enough to love other humans, we all will endure the pain of seeing those loved ones leave us — for other places, for other realms, into their own minds — when lives end. But what if the AI revolution that we in 2026 now see daily on our computer screens can affect that inevitability? What if there are ways to allow us, the living, to retain versions of the people we love beyond their natural lives? Who and what is served with these created versions of our remembered pasts? If we spend all our time living with our morphing memories, what then becomes of our individual and shared futures?

These questions are the fodder for playwright Jordan Harrison’s family drama that felt like distracted sci-fi to me when I experienced the original Off Broadway staging in 2015, but now confronts me like a prescient invitation and warning, in equal measure. All of the original creatives save the lighting designer have returned to engage with this timely material, and who can blame them? Leave the need for an intermission at the door at settle in for 90 minutes of a haunting and reckoning with our human futures enhanced or perhaps terrorized by the AI we have crafted to serve and haunt us.

Directed by Anne Kauffman, the drama is set in a near future that feels more present that the original staging just a decade ago, following the octogenarian Marjorie (June Squibb) whose memories looks to her companions to help her gather her fading memories — daughter Tess (Cynthis Nixon), son-in-law Jon (Danny Burstein), and a friendly handsome smooth skinned Walter (Christopher Lowell) who we soon learn is an AI version of Marjorie’s husband (in his youth) who died some years before. This version of Walter learns the stories he is told and repeats them as if they were his, offering them when asked. We can see how this might be comforting to an aging person living for reliving memories of past experiences. We also can now see and feel how an AI creation, the “prime” of the title, who learns might morph into something unexpected on their own. Do we fear this possibility or cheer it on?

This is, surprisingly, a play of gentle moments rather than a technological game show. An elder mourns her fading past. Two middle-aged characters, Tess and Jon, see their own future in Marjorie and mourn their elder’s slow fade. The fourth AI creation lives on stage as an “almost human” who evolves as he learns from repeated stories and new details, perhaps more than the other characters who are caught in their cycles of caring for each other and emoting about the changes of their lives. Squibb, in her 90s playing a character in her 80s, performs like a trooper primarily from an overstuffed armchair with grace and focus. Burstein is tender and kind; Lowell is both rigid and charming and can melt your heart; and Nixon layers the pain of daughterhood and past traumas at the hands of her mother Marjorie with the pain of her own mothering, exhausted and bitter and in the end, resolved.

Ben Stanton’s lighting design (the one new member of the creative team to make the leap from the Playwrights Horizon’s 2015 production to Broadway) is institution broad when needed in Marjories assisted living apartment (I imagined) and spare and effective, backlit drama where needed. Lee Jellinek’s set is spare and provocatively off-kilter; costumes by de la Rosa are function and contemporary with a little bit of futuristic flair.

“Science is here,” Tess notes to Jon at one point of the play. Yes it is. As with the characters in this play, we are all now grappling with how we will allow it to serve us, and how we will attend its transformations of our lives.

© Martha Wade Steketee (December 8, 2025)

Playwright | Jordan Harrison
Director | Anne Kauffman
Set Design | Lee Jellinek
Costume Design | Márion Talán de la Rosa
Lighting Design | Ben Stanton
Sound Design | Daniel Kluger
Music | Daniel Kluger