The Return and Reconstruction of “Marjorie Prime” – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Broadway Theatre Review: Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime

By Ross

There is something quietly devastating about returning to Marjorie Prime in 2025. What once felt like speculative fiction now sits uncomfortably close to our daily reality, and that proximity changes the experience. Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize finalist play, now making its Broadway debut at the Hayes Theater many years later, remains a tender and poignant meditation on memory, love, aging, and death, even as its exploration of artificial intelligence feels newly loaded, and oddly passé. Directed with precision and restraint by Anne Kauffman (MTC’s Mary Jane), this Broadway revival doesn’t shout its relevance; it allows it to seep in, patiently and persistently, like grief and mourning.

Starring June Squibb (“Eleanor the Great”) in the title role of Marjorie, the quietly intense piece finds its anchor and holds onto her with an authentic grip. Standing nearby, Cynthia Nixon (Broadway’s The Little Foxes; “The Gilded Age“) as her daughter Tess, Danny Burstein (Broadway’s Moulin Rouge!) as son-in-law Jon, and Christopher Lowell (Broadway’s Cult of Love) as Walter Prime, a digital recreation of Marjorie’s late husband, fill in the frame with diligent preciseness wrapped in clear intentions. Squibb brings warmth, humour, and an endearing vulnerability to Marjorie, grounding the play in something recognizably human, etched with both the positives and the negatives.

But it is Nixon who truly finds the tremors beneath the surface. Her Tess is brittle, angry, wounded, and searching, navigating grief not as something poetic but as something exhausting and unresolved. Nixon locates the sadness and sarcastic aloneness at the center of the play, even when she is surrounded on all sides. This is especially true in Tess’s fraught relationship with both her mother and the Prime conceptual ideas that surround them. Her brittleness and anger are authentic and personally connecting, offering a magnetic, combustible performance steeped in discomfort and emotional clarity.

Watching this production and Nixon’s performance was like a quiet, complex scratch at the door. I felt all the time, those days and nights I am currently spending with my own elderly mother in the house I grew up in, sharpen the play’s impact in unexpected and complicated ways. Second Stage‘s Marjorie Prime became not just a meditation on memory, but on communication, on what is said and what is withheld, and, oddly, on how easily we substitute technology for emotional labor. Harrison’s script, witty and occasionally pleasurably sarcastic, feels more relevant now than when I first encountered it off-Broadway.

But that relevance comes with a slight tinge of frustration. If this play were written today, I think we all would be demanding more from its interrogation of AI: more discomfort, more risk, more confrontation with what it means to ask technology to learn us, remember us, and stand in for intimacy we often fail to offer one another. That restraint feels especially pointed now, when so many of us are already asking technology to remember, respond, and comfort in ways our human relationships often cannot, or will not.

Creatively, the production is spare and coolly suburban. Lee Jellinek’s scenic design creates a tidy, futuristic space that never overwhelms the emotional stakes, nor gives us any indication of rotating feelings or growth. The costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa (NYCC Encores’ Titanic) subtly situate the characters between present and imagined futures without going overboard. Ben Stanton’s lighting and Daniel Kluger’s sound design and original music gently underscore the play’s emotional shifts without telegraphing them, highlighting Prime moments elegantly with textured meaning. Kauffman’s direction remains impressively controlled throughout, allowing silence, pauses, and repetition to do much of the work. It is a cleverly quiet evening of theatre, tightly wound and emotionally resonant, even when its intellectual ambitions don’t fully satisfy the unease it stirs.

Marjorie Prime, as it turns itself around and about, is less about technology than it is about us humans dealing with grief, resentment, anger, and the frustrating limits of familial connection. Its science-fiction frame is a lens, not a destination. And while that focus now feels insufficiently sharp for the moment we’re living in, the play still lands with considerable emotional weight, especially if we are living within a similar framework of parental care or aging. What lingers is not the futuristic novelty but the ache of constructed, reframed memory and the fear of being forgotten. Technology advances, that will always be the case, but the hardest work remains stubbornly human. It lives in the way we listen, remember, and love imperfectly, while we still can engage and connect.