Reviews NYCOff-Broadway Published 5 February 2025

Review: The Antiquities at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons ⋄ January 11-February 23, 2025

Jordan Harrison’s exciting new play is intellectually impressive and philosophically a bit terrifying. Loren Noveck reviews.

Loren Noveck
Andrew Garman, Amelia Workman, and Julius Rinzel in The Antiquities. Photo: Emilio Madrid

Andrew Garman, Amelia Workman, and Julius Rinzel in The Antiquities. Photo: Emilio Madrid

In the press release for The Antiquities, playwright Jordan Harrison notes that the playsits in that tension between embracing progress and fearing it”; it’s about the way we thrive through technology and the way technology promises, or threatens, to outlive us. This kind of tension between the real and the ever-so-slightly counterfactual is a hallmark of Harrison’s work, which often imagines our near future as a way of allowing us an analytical vantage on our present. Here, he’s poured the entire world into that gap between now and fictional then: We’re instructed to imagine our future selves imagining our now selves watching a play that in the confines of the playworld isn’t taking place in physical space at all. If the Brechtian “alienation effect” dictates that the audience never has the luxury of believing it’s peering through a fourth wall at an event actually taking place, in this play, we immediately give up the luxury of believing that there are any events actually taking place at all. The actors tell us to imagine our fictive post-human selves into “these seats in this room in the late human age.” The possibilities are mindblowingly recursive, existentially terrifying, and a tribute to the very real embodied existence of theater, all at once: because we are in the room, and we do wear our physical bodies, and we are watching a piece of art constructed and embodied by humans even while it’s pretending it’s something else entirely. Or so we think.

I am enormously impressed by The Antiquities: its intricate structure, the way its themes ripple from scene to scene, its way of carefully putting little weights on either side of the intellectual scales while prodding at our emotions at the same time, the way its paired directors (David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan) and ensemble of nine actors bring such clarity and such variety of tone to the multiple worlds in which the play occurs. But at this particular historical moment, I also found it terrifying to be asked to consider the possibilities of connection and friendship and augmentation on the “pro” side of technology as I watch the destruction that a series of tech oligarchs–whose tools, make no mistake, I use every day–are wreaking on our political system. When it seems distinctly possible that by this time next week, NEA funding (if it exists at all) will be automatically revoked from a play that, like this one, includes in its casting breakdown a Black actor playing Lord Byron, it becomes harder to watch with anything but mournful shock. 

The full title of the play is A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, and its conceit is to imagine that collection as being something along the lines of VR dioramas a la the American Museum of Natural History. Each scene is set in a different year among different people, traveling forward in time over about 400 years to the museum exhibit itself, and then ebbing backward the way it came. On sparse sets (by Paul Steinberg) built from different configurations of matte brushed-metal walls, each vignette features a piece of human technology that we will later see revisited as a museum artifact–telephones in all their forms feature prominently, from rotary dial to flip to smartphone–and many of them also feature, glancingly, other objects more talismanic in nature–a teddy bear, a clarinet, things that reflect human emotion and idle creativity rather than technological ingenuity. (The conceit does at times require a little massaging; the play’s first scene is set in 1816 and its representative technology is fire, which obviously predates that moment by millennia.)

As the scenes travel forward in time, we hover between optimism and bracing ourselves for just how bad the play imagines things will get, and as the second half closed parentheses after parentheses that the first half had opened (a la David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas), I couldn’t help but shudder at the missed opportunities to make different choices. Entranced by the wonders of progress–by the ability of technology to save memories, reveal us to ourselves and our loved ones, make things easier, make us feel better–we forget to guard ourselves against the moment when the progress we spurred outstrips us, proving humanity “a transitional species. A blip on the timeline.” 

Harrison takes the night in 1816 when Mary Shelley famously conceived Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva as the play’s “eureka” moment: the conception of a creature conceived in the image of, but defiantly not, a human that teaches itself by learning–and then turns on its creator, who failed to grasp either the promise or the danger of his new invention. We touch down briefly in the early twentieth century, in some sort of grim factory/poorhouse; linger a bit in the late twentieth century with a robotics engineer named Stu; watch cellphones and the internet come about; and then skip into the near and not-so-near future, ending in 2240 when humanity has been evicted from modernity by the technology we created. Our final characters churn butter in rags and wait for fertility to decline enough to kill off the species entirely. There’s still some pleasures to be had in our human bodies–but the future is post-human, a room full of incomprehensible artifacts watched only by the machines. “Look alive,” say two museum guides at the top of the play, miked subtly so their voices shade toward the mechanical. That’s all that’s left: the simulacrum of both looking and living.

The shape is meant, I think, to mirror Harrison’s tension regarding progress: one thread gives us the exciting possibilities of the cyborg manifesto, and the next points us at Skynet (that’s a little facetious, but only a little; there are definite parallels to how the backstory of the Terminator movies goes down). For the most part, the vignettes link thematically rather than in a direct plot way: patterns in casting and story elements and bits of technology appear and recur, both slightly askew in the bookend scenes–the digital assistant “Robyn” is built in one scene and used in a home in its mirror scene–and in chronologically adjacent scenes, so we see a neural link device being welcomed in one scene and turning its users into prey for machines in another. (In its mosaic quality and its way of letting ideas leach through character sketches,  it reminded me of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, though with more narrative drive.)

There is something intentionally uncanny about the whole: we’re never supposed to forget that we’re viewing a retrospective reconstruction of events, assembled by post-humans. Blackouts often last just long enough to be actively uncomfortable. Sound is sometimes miked. The play is larded with “Easter eggs” tipping us off to this infidelity to the real, though it’s very subtle; I definitely saw some of these “glitches in the matrix” but didn’t always recognize them as the clues they were. (A character storing a videocassette in the refrigerator, for example, or a doctor playing a clarinet to spark a muscle reflex.) But because so much of it is also built on pattern recognition, on the laying down of a thread to be picked up later when the play moves in the other direction, the overall effect is more intellectual revelation and twitches of uncomfortable recognition than emotional engagement. And I was a little bothered by how American-centric the post-twentieth-century segments remained; I would have imagined that the later phases of the “late human era” would be more global. (One could, I suppose, easily counterargue that the current AI interfaces, being mostly designed in America–though that’s less true than it was even two weeks ago–would overweight the American experience in exactly this way if allowed to keep developing in their current direction.) 

Given how much of the play is about tension between opposites and that its narrative structure is doubled, it makes a sort of intuitive sense to have co-directors, though it’s also an unusual choice, especially for two directors known for their nuanced work with actors and new writing: how do you split that sort of a relationship with a deep ensemble cast? But because the play segments itself so naturally, it becomes easier to imagine Sullivan and Cromer using their skills to give the different time frames subtle shifts in tone. 

Tyler Micoleau’s lighting also does wonderful work distinguishing the times and places, from a dim Edison bulb warmth in 1910 to the chilly fluorescent glow of a 1980s refrigerator or the flat baking sunlight of a post-civilization 2240. The nine-actor ensemble–eight adults and one child–is solid throughout, though for each actor, one role sticks with me: Cindy Cheung’s grieving, furious mother; Ryan Spahn’s idealistic, closeted robotics engineer and Aria Shahghasemi as the trick with whom he gingerly explores his sexuality; Amelia Workman and Marchánt Davis in the farthest-future scene, as a pair of people grappling with the possibility of the end of humanity. 

I think we’re meant to find hope in “the human relics that defy our understanding,” the gods they represent long forgotten. The weird traces of humanity’s affection for its objects–its talismans–stand as an affective journey alongside the more measurable human progress. But in a moment when technological progress is explicitly being used to counter the idea of a moral universe that bends toward justice; when we see every day the results of bad algorithms–it’s hard to find that hope. The Antiquities is a striking accomplishment as a piece of intricate, thought-provoking playwriting; it’s given a gorgeous, intelligent production here. But it also makes me look deeper into the abyss of the accelerating demise of the American experiment and wonder whether the “late human age” depicted here will belong to China after all.

I saw What the Constitution Means to Me on the day Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018. At the time, I said, “I started out not wanting this review to be entirely about politics, or at least not about my politics. But the show—like America right now—blends the personal and the political in ways that are as inextricable as the conversations I can’t seem to stop having.” I can’t help having some of those same emotions right now.


Loren Noveck

Loren Noveck is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the literary manager of Six Figures Theatre Company. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, and NYTheater now, and currently writes occasionally for HowlRound and WIT Online. In her non-theatrical life, she works in book publishing.

Review: The Antiquities at Playwrights Horizons Show Info


Produced by Playwrights Horizons/ Vineyard Theatre/ Goodman Theatre

Directed by David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan

Written by Jordan Harrison

Scenic Design Paul Steinberg

Costume Design Brenda Abbandandolo

Lighting Design Tyler Micoleau

Sound Design Christopher Darbassie

Cast includes Cindy Cheung, Marchánt Davis, Layan Elwazani, Andrew Garman, Aria Shahghasemi, Kristen Sieh, Ryan Spahn, Julius Rinzel, and Amelia Workman

Link
Show Details & Tickets

Running Time 1 hr 40 minutes


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