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Review: The Antiquities is Far From Old Hat
February 4, 2025, 8:11.53 pm ET

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Photo: Emilio Madrid

By Brian Scott Lipton

"How did it happen, how did we get so far off the track?” Stephen Sondheim asked in “Merrily We Roll Along.” That query re-emerges, in far different language and with far more chilling implications, in “The Antiquities,” Jordan Harrison’s thought-provoking theatrical treatise on the pros and cons of modern-day technology, now onstage at Playwrights Horizons (which is co-producing the play with the Vineyard Theatre and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre).

Rather than creating a traditional narrative, Harrison has crafted an unusual 100-minute work, co-directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, that is comprised of approximately two dozen vignettes spanning over 200 years. They are presented to us as living dioramas on exhibit at “The Museum of Late Human Antiquities,” and are meant to illustrate how humans, wittingly and unwittingly, contributed to our own eventual extinction by embracing “positive” technological advances from cell phones to the Internet.

To accomplish this remarkable feat, nine top-notch actors (Cindy Cheung, Marchant Davis, Layan Elwazani, Andrew Garman, Julius Rinzel, Aria Shahghasemi, Kristein Sieh, Ryan Spahn, and Amelia Workman) play every role, seemingly at home at whichever century, decade or year they’ve been assigned to. (Paul Steinberg’s remarkable, ever-changing set and Brenda Abbandandolo’s spot-on costumes are major assets, as well.)

Our tour of the museum starts and ends in 1810 with Mary Shelley being dared to tell a ghost story, and then ultimately describing her vision for “Frankenstein” leading to our startling realization that her now-legendary novel was much more than a horror story, it was an early blueprint for how to create “artificial intelligence.”

While the vignettes that follow don’t include anyone as famous as Shelley (or her companions, who include Percy Shelley and Lord Byron), the people in them – sometimes nameless – consistently resonate with us: a nerdy gay inventor in the 1970s who will die from AIDS, the Asian mother who grieves (in her own way) the sudden death of her college-aged Americanized daughter, the screenwriter who feels she must implant AI into her brain to keep working, or the humans who struggle to maintain their mere existence after the “nonorganics” have clearly become the overwhelming majority.

Admittedly, Harrison’s structure is a bit repetitive, and one wishes that he’d found some ways to incorporate a bit more humor in his script. (The funniest sequences involve the invention –and eventual use – of “Robin,” aka Siri.) Still, he makes his point so deftly that you may be tempted to throw away your iPhone and disconnect Alexa the minute you get home.

Don’t bother! Harrison makes it clear that such actions would merely be performative. Indeed, one can’t really argue that “The Antiquities” is a cautionary tale. There’s no question that artificial intelligence is here to stay; all that’s left for us to discover is whether Harrison’s dire predictions about the future of the human race – and technology’s part in making it happen -- will come true or turn out to be mere figments of the playwright’s vivid imagination.

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