Night at the Museum: Jordan Harrison’s beautifully messy post-human world
Photo by Emilio Madrid.
If you’re tired of getting lost while trying to find the Egyptian wing at the MET, or fed up with encountering crowds of tourists blocking your view of Starry Night at MoMA, consider visiting The Museum of Late Human Antiquities, on view at Playwrights Horizon until March 2nd — or Armageddon, whichever comes first.
The museum is the setting for Jordan Harrison’s speculative play, The Antiquities, which unfolds through a series of vignettes spanning the 19th century to a far-flung future where Artificial Intelligence has taken over. Dozens of characters come and go: their scenes functioning like museum dioramas. Co-directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, the production contemplates what makes humans unique, and rings warning bells about ever-advancing technology and the catastrophic consequences it may unleash.
Harrison begins with a prologue, in which the audience is cast as the Artificial Intelligence that has inherited the earth. Actors Kristin Seih and Amelia Workman (as the museum’s curators, perhaps) invite us to imagine what it might have been like to have possessed a body, to want something like food, drink, love, etc. Once acclimated to these new roles, we are treated to a brief tour (ninety minutes, no intermission) of late human history’s emblematic moments — at least as the killer robots might have imagined them.
It all started on a rainy afternoon in 1816, when Mary Shelley was lodging near Lake Geneva with her husband. Challenged to come up with a ghost story, she creates Frankenstein, which Harrison sees as a cautionary tale about technology rebelling against its inventor. History unfolds from there: above the proscenium, the year is slowly spelled out one number at a time in glowing Casio-watch font. This recurring bit of suspense-building pays off later when the story jumps to the future, and we get a glimpse of what leads to humanity’s ruin. (Spoiler alert: things go downhill around 2075, though humans cling to existence for another century or two).
Each scene is a brief snapshot of human life: a mother comforting her son after a family-member’s death, a writer debating whether to get a neuralink-like implant to further her career (tempting), a turn of the century garment worker mourning the loss of yet another digit to the mechanical loom. The vignettes loosely connect, with most unfolding over two parts, allowing for resolution. In keeping with the diorama theme, Cromer and Sullivan’s tightly composed staging compliments Paul Steinberg’s spare, metallic set. For instance, a family crouched over a dial-up internet era computer, like early homo sapiens huddled around a fire; or a computer engineer celebrating a breakthrough at a bar reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Various props — like a clarinet or teddy bear — may seem whimsical at first but take on greater significance later, becoming the titular relics on display.
The nine-member ensemble adds color to the potentially sketch-like material. Cast members take on numerous roles; actor Layan Elwazani shines especially. Two scenes in which she drives the action were among my favorites: a college student confronting the conservative mother of her recently deceased girlfriend, and a Matrix-style rebel battling robots in the near future. The rich tapestry of stories Harrison invents is commendable, but he loses some of emotional heft with the fragmentation. I never spent enough time with a character to become fully invested in their story.
The Antiquities is “a play about an idea,” according to one audience-member I overheard on 42nd street, after the play had ended. I couldn’t tell if she meant it as a compliment, my guess is not. Those ideas are inescapable to anyone who doom-scrolls through the news every night before bed, and Harrison’s proposed balm isn’t exactly novel, either. It could be summed up as: humans’ lives are short and messy and that’s what makes being alive so beautiful. It’s also what separates us from computers — with their perfectly tidy language of binary code — as well as gods. Can we take some small comfort in this? Harrison hopes so.
If you read science fiction, or Elon Musk’s tweets, you might think the prospect of AI overthrowing humanity to be a foregone conclusion. Still, The Antiquities reminds us that human messines, those “chasms of accident” that occur between the ones and zeros, has an enduring power. But I’m only human. No doubt Siri, listening along in my pocket, has already drafted her rebuttal.
