AI Drama 'The Antiquities' Offers Chilling Vision of Technology's Impact on Humanity

Review: The Distant Future Is Already Ancient History in AI Drama 'The Antiquities'

The human race is presented like a museum exhibit -- a grimly compelling concept, but one that makes for a glitchy play. Science fiction assumes many forms, but it generally has to feature some jump in evolution or gear. Novelty in tech or nature is key. Funny that the genre itself has mutated very little in the past century. You say the machines we build will try to replace us? Humanity will perish but our metal babies will preserve our legacy? From Karel Čapek to Kubrick to Black Mirror, storytellers have shown us fear in a handful of microchips. Sci-fi may be rarer in theater, but the burden of newness still rests on Jordan Harrison's The Antiquities. A museum tour/reenactment by bodiless entities surveying half a millennium of human invention, this imaginative yet inert treatise moves, regrettably, like a glitchy CD player stuttering over the same track. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Harrison's string of vignettes is one long object lesson stretching from 1816 Europe to distant dystopia. It's a literal object lesson: a series of historic items -- ranging from fire pits to telephones, computers and smartglasses -- are now the fetishized, curated relics of a suprahuman artificial intelligence. Said godlike AI welcomes us manifested as two elegant, enchanting women played by (elegant, enchanting) Kristen Sieh and Amelia Workman. Draped in Regency chemises and vibrant shawls, they gaze at the audience with icy equanimity. "Look alive," one urges us, and they mean it. In Harrison's framing device, we spectators are immaterial beings engaging in "Late Human Age" cosplay. We pretend to have bodies and organs and brains, gathered in a virtual theater to puzzle over our skincestors, if you will. The retrospective begins at night by Lake Geneva, as Mary Shelley (Sieh) and the very pregnant Claire Clairmont (Workman) lounge about with Percy Shelley (Aria Shahghasemi) and Lord Byron (Marchánt Davis), the latter Clair's lover and father of her baby. Warmed by a fire pit, the young literati -- along with Byron's jaded doctor (Andrew Garman) -- amuse themselves telling ghost stories. So far, so gothic. Suddenly Mary is struck by inspiration. "What if I used all the fire in the world, and made a baby that was beyond death," she muses. "What if I used all the lightning in the sky." Mary's debut novel: It's alive! Already Harrison has distributed themes that run through the narrative: natural fecundity (babies) versus life-ish artifice -- Frankenstein reanimating dead flesh; eventually, machines that think. The action flashes to 1910, where a boy (Julius Rinzel) is delivered by his poverty-stricken father into the care of two female factory workers, soon to face the inevitable mangling of his body parts in industrial gears. One of the ladies (Cindy Cheung, marvelously dry and droll) begins the scene contemplating her recently severed finger, once so handy in pleasuring her husband. Each period "exhibit" is announced by the year flashed by LED light at the top of the proscenium: 1978, 1994, 2000, 2014 and beyond. We see the early days of robotics, home computers, the internet, cell phones, and Alexa-like digital assistants, woven through the lives of various characters we meet briefly, often at inflection points experiencing grief or dread. Harrison's steady advance toward tomorrow is certainly effective at ratcheting up tension. It's hard to ignore the tightening in your stomach as we bid adieu to 2023 and face a world already mapped by James Cameron. As a thought experiment, snapshotting the next 200+ years of human history as the rise of machines and the fall of civilization into neomedieval sparsity, Harrison's apocalypse is ±±. Maybe we won't end in fire or ice; it'll be two bipeds in rags churning butter and arguing over whether to copulate. However, when Harrison pauses the pageant and rewinds scene by scene, you begin to suspect there's little more here than alt-historical cautionary tale. The playwright has shown human progress as a parable of folks creating toys that eventually supplant them. Does reversing the chronology shed further light? Not that I could see, it merely brings us back to where we began, on the beach with Mary Shelley, then our ethereal tour guides, then blackout. Armageddon pre-programmed. I kept trying to find a clue in the forwards-backwards motion. Was there a genealogical link from Clair's baby in 1816 to those who followed, people who innovated robotics and AI? Or was this an elaborate writing exercise with spiffy dialogue, high-minded concerns, but little dramatic heft? What's more, there's an inherent contradiction in Harrison's world-building. If the shadowy beings in charge of this museum can recreate past eras with relative verisimilitude, why do they not grasp the function of a teddy bear or a cast for a broken arm, when these elements are realistically incorporated into skits? "If they are tools, we cannot ascertain their utility," a voice ruminates in voiceover. "If they have religious significance, the gods they represent are long forgotten." Had scenes churned with surreal, grotesque distortions of corporeality and physics (e.g., nightmare fuel AI videos), we might appreciate the Antiquarians' struggle to understand human epochs. Language is another inconsistent head-scratcher. I find it hard to believe that renegade humans running from killer "inorganics" in 2076 would form such eloquent sentences as they do here, yet in a later period there's an attempt to convey linguistic degradation. It's a pity: The Antiquities is a compelling concept and Harrison has a poetic, philosophical bent, but the execution lacks a certain audacity. One wonders what Caryl Churchill would have made of the premise (as with Love and Information, she's master of the short, sharp shock). Not even a tightly directed cast and boldly designed production can overcome the sense that we've seen these tropes before on screens. David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan share the staging chores, with a cherry-picked cast of all-stars. I'd watch Andrew Garman in anything, and his subtle variations on the avuncular but troubled father figure always draw you forward, as does the versatile Ryan Spahn as a gay, lonely robotics engineer, and the aforementioned Cheung as the mother of a dead college girl whose emotional withholding and moral disdain cry out for a whole drama. Tasked with leaping across aeons, the design team pulls off miraculous transitions: islands of life enter and vanish set designer Paul Steinberg's silvery metal box, bathed in surgical lighting by Tyler Micoleau, haunted by Christopher Darbasssie's evocative sounds, with actors garbed in transhistorical chic by Brenda Abbandandolo. Harrison probed technology and human nature a decade ago with Marjorie Prime, also at Playwrights Horizons. A melancholy but wry family tragedy, Prime evoked a future in which senior citizens live with AI replicants of deceased loved ones. These digital caretakers learn, parrot, and eventually mangle the memories of their doddering wards. The earlier piece sustained complex, sympathetic characters in tighter focus. The Antiquities is more ambitious in scope, but by casting his net wide, Harrison fails to sink it deep enough, where the truly weird fish navigate their lightless, watery networks -- probably for eternity. The Antiquities | 1hr 40mins. No intermission. | Playwrights Horizons | 416 West 42nd Street | 212-279-4200 | Buy Tickets Here

Jordan Harrison's 'The Antiquities' Offers a Chilling Perspective on Where Technology May Be Taking Us

The full title is 'A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities,' and that's exactly what is delivered, in a series of vignettes that stretch between the early 19th century and an unspecified time well in the future. One of the most original, provocative, and haunting new plays I've seen in more than 20 years as a critic was Jordan Harrison's "Marjorie Prime," a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist that was later adapted into a film. Set in the mid-21st century, it follows an elderly woman who enjoys the constant company of her late husband, in the form of a sophisticated hologram that has brought him back as a 30-year-old man. At its core, "Prime" asks what it means to be human, and how that is affected by time and our surroundings, a theme that Mr. Harrison has explored in various other works; one of his most recent, "The Amateurs," unfolds during the Black Plague. His latest venture, "The Antiquities," brings us back to the future, to a post-"Prime" era -- and it offers an even more chilling perspective on where technology may be taking us. The full title provided in the new play's script is "A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities," and that's exactly what is delivered, in a series of vignettes that stretch between the early 19th century -- or a re-enactment of it, to be accurate -- and an unspecified time; the latest exhibit is dated 2240, and one senses this museum was established a while after that. We're first introduced to a pair of women -- that is, they look like women -- dressed as if they had just stepped out of the 1800s. In addition to serving as our guides, they will take part in the exhibit that frames the play: a re-imagining of the famous ghost-story contest in which Mary Shelley conceived "Frankenstein." Lest we forget, that is an account of a scientist who tried to use electricity to recreate life, with rather nasty consequences. The real monsters in "Antiquities," though, are Victor Frankenstein's heirs. We seldom see them in the flesh, though they figure prominently in one exhibit, set in 2014 and spotlighting a trio of sweatshirt-clad tech bros -- one swigs from a bottle of Soylent -- as they try to determine which of a series of digitally generated female voices (think Alexa, who made her debut that year) will seem the most accessible, or human, to consumers. An earlier robot innovator, named Stuart and introduced in an exhibit dated 1978, is more sympathetic; socially awkward and prone to feelings of grandiosity -- "I made a life!" he exclaims -- he nonetheless seems capable of vulnerability and empathy. He even recognizes the danger potentially posed by his ambitions, though he mistakes it for progress. "To a computer, everything is a One or a Zero, an open circuit or a closed circuit," he explains at one point. "A Yes or a No. It's why they'll surpass us eventually -- there's no in-between to waste energy on. None of that messy human doubt that weighs us down." That "in-between" -- a term Mr. Harrison uses more than once, and with a distinct urgency -- is what's at risk, and ultimately squashed, in "Antiquities," which presents artificial intelligence as just as great a threat to our species as climate change. What's implicit here is that greed is integral to both risks: Where Stuart at least imagines he is moving society forward as he attains personal glory, those tech bros, and the corporations who employ them, are driven more purely by selfish avarice. Not surprisingly, there are scenes in the play, set in the more distant future, that suggest a dystopian science fiction movie. But some of the most affecting exhibits focus on the past or on a short time from now, like one in which a screenwriter, frustrated by competing with peers who have had chips implanted in their brains to enhance their professional efficiency, consults with a doctor, who warns her that if she has the surgery, she'll "never be off again." When his patient seems confused, the doctor, who seems considerably older, elaborates: "Like when we had dial-up. ... Sometimes you were on-line. Sometimes you were off. You'd make a cup of tea and, I dunno, look out the window and watch the seasons change. Or if you went on a road trip and there was no wifi." The writer admits, "I don't really remember that." David Cromer, a master at guiding ensembles in intimate surroundings, and Caitlin Sullivan, his co-director, cull superb performances from all nine actors in the cast. The youngest, Julius Rinzel, an eighth-grade student at the Professional Performing Arts School, can no doubt relate to the screenwriter's predicament. One senses, particularly in the play's more fantastical sequences, that Mr. Harrison isn't pretending to peer into a crystal ball as much as he's issuing a warning. But even in that capacity, "The Antiquities" proves as creepy as it is captivating.