Goodman’s “The Antiquities,” with Amelia Workman and Kristen Sieh/Photo: Hugo Hentoff
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The future used to be so much farther away.
We would read dystopian novels about all-knowing, killer robots and think, “That’s scary—but not in my lifetime.”
Alas, the future is here now. And “The Antiquities,” an intense and sobering play by Jordan Harrison now being performed at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre, puts the monsters right in your lap.
This is both a play about the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the glory of being human—about the value of everything we experience, from grief to passion to creativity. In predicting a world without us, the play celebrates the sweet messiness of life lived between the “ones” and the “zeroes.”
“A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities” (the longer title) is set in a museum run by immortal and condescending AI beings. Human artifacts like a clarinet, a teddy bear and a rotary phone are preserved in lighted cases, like relics of ancient Babylonia. The museum also offers its robot visitors scenes of what human life was like before AI took over.
Since the AI museum curators are, like humans, mostly interested in themselves, the scenes all depict stages in the rise of AI. They start in 1816 with Mary Shelley telling her literary friends her story of Frankenstein. Then there’s a scene about a factory girl losing her finger to a machine that worked faster than she did, a 1970s nerd excited because he got his robot to dodge an obstacle, a 1980s family waiting for their dial-up computer to connect, 2010s Silicon Valley inventors deciding on a “Siri”-type voice, etc. The second half revisits the characters of the first half a little further in their future.
Goodman’s “The Antiquities,” with Kristen Sieh and Thomas Murphy Molony/Photo: Hugo Hentoff
Co-directed by Caitlin Sullivan and David Cromer and playing for a brisk ninety-five minutes without intermission, the scenes are performed by nine actors playing forty-seven characters. This sounds like too much and yet isn’t, because the actors are all so good, and because the scenes are bound together both by technology’s creeping menace and by common themes of sorrow and longing. You care about these people, however briefly you know them. They are us—a woman who lost her baby, a gay man dying of what was likely AIDS, a mom who wants to go to Paris, a writer wondering if she can still work.
The play’s thoughtful, elegiac mood is aided by the original set design by Paul Steinberg and lighting by Tyler Micoleau, which manages to be both stark and intimate. One scene is lit only by an open refrigerator door, with a mom (Kristen Sieh) trying to explain death to her young son (Thomas Murphy Molony) in the middle of the night. The scenes with Mary Shelley (also Sieh) and friends are lit by a red smoky campfire, suggesting wildness and hidden terrors.
“The Antiquities” is a world premiere co-production by the Goodman, Playwrights Horizons and Vineyard Theatre—it originally played off-Broadway and is using mostly the same cast. Like Harrison’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-finalist play, “Marjorie Prime,” “The Antiquities” is a play of big ideas about the meaning of life. It reminds us that even if humans are just a blip on the universal timeline, we had some things worth remembering. Like teddy bears and sex, and clarinets and live theater. Get it while you can.
“The Antiquities” runs through June 1 at Goodman’s Owen Theatre, 170 North Dearborn. Tickets are $20-$65, available at goodmantheatre.org.
