Jordan Harrison’s futuristic play makes its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons.
Last week, MAGA evangelist Steve Bannon appeared on the New York Times podcast Matter of Opinion and made an alarming prediction: In the next decade, we will all have the option to enhance our bodes with AI technology. According to Bannon, if tech oligarchs like Elon Musk get their way, choosing not to enhance will be the first step on the road to techno-serfdom as humanity diverges on two distinct evolutionary paths.
You might dismiss this as science fiction, but it’s a scenario embraced by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on earth (some say it’s already happening). It is also the assumption undergirding Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities, which is now having a must-see world premiere at Playwrights Horizons (co-produced by Vineyard Theatre and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre). It takes audiences on a tour of the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, where post-human curators attempt to convey what it was like to live in a human body in the period leading up to the great merger of man and machine—which is to say, right now.
“You put food in your body and you can feel it now, on its mazy journey through you,” says Kristen Sieh with the gentle patience one might conjure when explaining to a 5-year-old how people went to the bathroom in the age before indoor plumbing. She and Amelia Workman appear as our hosts, adopting rigid postures and neutral, ever-so-slightly disdainful facial expressions. They strike the perfect tone as our godlike successors, the mostly nonorganic beings who have conquered death but deign to peer back through the mists to a more savage time.
They present a series of theatrical exhibits on late human life: We start with Mary Shelley (Sieh) and her circle telling ghost stories around a campfire as she feels the earliest inspirations for Frankenstein. The story flashes forward to 1910, where a mill worker (Cindy Cheung) mourns the loss of a finger: “I was thinking of something else, for an instant, and the machine went chomp. It works faster than me, is the trouble.”
Later scenes depict a robotics engineer (Ryan Spahn) celebrating a breakthrough in 1978, a family dialing up to the Internet in 1994, a granddaughter (Sieh) helping her grandfather (Andrew Garman) set up his first smartphone in 2008, an AI engineer (Layan Elwazani) reviewing an imposing nondisclosure agreement in return for a multimillion-dollar settlement in 2023, a band of human resistance fighters attempting to hold off the inevitable in 2076, and a couple of late humans (Workman and Marchánt Davis) on the reservation circa 2240.
Like their human forebears, the AI curators of The Antiquities are mostly interested in this story as it relates to them. Harrison’s short and emotionally resonant scenes land with maximum impact as we witness humanity confronting its own creation. He provides only the faintest outline of the escalation of hostilities in the 21st century, forcing the audience to fill in the blanks with our own darkest terrors in a particularly powerful dramatic striptease. We may not see every step onstage, but the path from here to there is clear and believable.
The most unsettlingly plausible scene takes place in 2032. A writer (Workman seems to absorb the genuine existential dread in the room and concentrate it in one performance) sits on an examining table and consults with her doctor (Garman) about implanting a brain-computer interface. “I’m like the only writer who hasn’t done it yet,” she ruefully confesses as she tap-dances on the eroding middle-ground between fear of the unknown and the fear of missing out. “I’m getting left behind. It’s this or I can’t work anymore.” And let’s be honest: That’s really why you took the Covid vaccine in 2021, isn’t it?
Directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan skillfully maintain an air of wonder while grounding the story in our world as each new scene emerges from the planetarium-like dimness of Tyler Micoleau’s lighting to appear on Paul Steinberg’s sleek metallic holodeck of a set. Brenda Abbandandolo rises to the herculean task of imagining costumes for both the past and future, challenging us to think about the confident displays of anachronism that likely exist in our own museums. The screech of dial-up Internet becomes a menacing war horn in Christopher Darbassie’s subtly effective sound design, which further anchors science fiction to familiar elements in our everyday lives. It all makes for a potent and uncomfortably convincing vision of where we are headed.
The Antiquities is the story of how our own hard-won evolutionary impulses, the traits that have made homo sapiens the dominant species on earth, inexorably lead to our decline. Often described as a pessimist, Harrison questions the value in wringing our hands and wishing that the world would stop turning—or, at least, our curators do. But they’re from the future and have every incentive to justify their triumph as inevitable. “What seems clear is that humans thought of themselves as the endpoint. The final step of evolution,” she says, “When the truth was, they were a transitional species. A blip on the timeline.”