Marjorie Prime review – Cynthia Nixon steals sad, and spotty, sci-fi revival

Hayes Theater, New York

The return of the 2014 play, now starring June Squibb as an octogenarian using a tech program to speak to her dead husband, veers between poetry and cliche

When Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime first premiered in 2014, its vision of synthetic sentience may have felt pretty novel. An old woman, Marjorie, talking to a hologram modeled after her long-dead husband perhaps seemed like a wild, far-fetched idea, that a computer program could somehow closely mimic the cadence of real conversation, could fake intimate knowledge of a person’s life. What a strange and alienating idea.

Just 11 years later (and eight years after a little-seen film adaptation), Marjorie Prime plays far more credibly. We may not have the hologram technology down quite yet, but everything else in Harrison’s AI speculation now seems well within reason. Perhaps that’s why Second Stage Theater decided to revive the play in its Broadway house, an attempt at commenting, and capitalizing, on the excited buzz and nervous chatter surrounding recent technological advancements.