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Marjorie Prime

Reviewed by Vanessa Cate

Mark Taper Forum

Through Oct. 19

Marjorie (Lois Smith) is an 85 year old woman with a long, rich life behind her that she now struggles to remember. To help ease the pain of her mental decline, Marjorie requests the company of her husband, Walter. The problem: he’s dead.

Her last name is “Prime”: “First in quality.” “Fundamental.” “The age of ideal physical perfection and intellectual vigor.” But in this play, a Prime is also a term for a new brand of Artificial Intelligence – an exact recreation of someone deceased. So with the utilization of modern technology from the not-too-distant-future, Marjorie is able to spend time with Walter Prime (Jeff Ward), a nearly exact duplicate (albeit a version some 50-years younger) of her old lover.

Harrison says his work was heavily inspired by the Turing Test, which is a real life test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human being. In this test, a human judge carries out conversations with a human and a machine. If the judge cannot tell for certain which is the machine and which is the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. Not only is this test real, but over the years, machines have scored higher and higher. Which poses the question – what differentiates man from machine?

The future in the play is very similar to the here-and-now, except that everything is beige and there are incredibly advanced robots in our homes. (The choice of Set Designer Mimi Lien and Costume Designer Ilona Somogyi to submerge us in a beige and gray palette is smart, presenting a neutral setting in which the year of the play is irrelevant, and makes everything look just different enough while adding some brightness to an otherwise stark piece.)

Though a Prime is a physical replica of a deceased person that you can program to walk, talk, and act just like the original, their programming extends only so far as physicality and the ability to actively learn and incorporate new information. You have to tell a Prime everything you would like them to know about the person they are posing as. Then, by inputting the ingredients of their personality, they will interact with you so convincingly that you might mistake them for the real thing.

Or maybe not. At no point in the play does anyone fall into a suspension of disbelief. One character says the process is merely “talking to yourself.” And even Marjorie, who is so mixed up she can’t at times remember who she is, can’t really believe the credibility of what’s going on. So how can we?

Harrison chooses not to go into the details of the Prime, and so instead of ingredients for science fiction, we must take them only as a device, a means to comprehend what the writer is trying to say dramatically.

As her mother’s mental faculties continue to diminish before her eyes, Tess (Lisa Emery) and husband Jon (Frank Wood) struggle to reconcile the fact that Marjorie is not the same person she was and never again will be. Rather than give up her precious control over the situation, Tess tries over and over again to tell Marjorie exactly who she is and how she should behave, just as Marjorie tells Walter Prime how to act.

The implications extend farther than the play itself. While the subject matter is both serious and at times profound, the execution is muddled. Marjorie calls her hands traitors for no longer being able to create the beautiful music she dreams of, despite it being in her mind. Perhaps in the same way, these characters are traitors to the writer’s vision, sacrificing emotional depth for easy one-liners and straight to the point banter. Important themes — the true terror of losing your sense of self, the loss of dignity, the grieving over a death of a loved one, and reconciling deep wounds from the past – are never fully reached. Instead we get a thoroughly stiff – even artificial – rendition of the human condition. And for a show all about humanity, there just isn’t enough there to begin with.

The staging is muted, the characters narrow, and the audience laughs their way through as Marjorie in her mental haze quotes Beyoncé, or Tess and her husband Jon banter casually. And while the final scene seems to finally reach the point, no remarkable discovery is made throughout the play. Instead, the characters simply tell you what to believe in sometimes-poetic, sometimes-straight-to-the-point dialogue. And being told so bluntly how to feel, I felt as if I were a Prime myself.

Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Los Angeles CA, 90012; LA; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m., Sat., 2:30 & 8 p.m, Sun. 1 & 6:30 p.m.; through Oct. 19. (213)-628-2772, https://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/Marjorie-Prime/