"Jordan Harrison's déjà-vu-inducing "Marjorie Prime" has been here before. The Off Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons produced the poignant sci-fi play about hyperrealistic re-creations of the dead-so-called Primes, which are used as a supportive technology for the bereaved-in Anne Kauffman's spirited, delicately comic production, back in 2015. Lois Smith, then eighty-five years old, played Marjorie, a woman struggling with dementia. It's the early twenty-sixties, and so Marjorie is attended by a holographic Prime of her husband, Walter, who tells her stories from her own life."
"Now Second Stage revives "Marjorie Prime" at the Hayes, on Broadway, with the mischievous ninety-six-year-old June Squibb as a new and more buoyant Marjorie. Squibb, our ingénue, has also been here before. Her Broadway début was as a replacement in the role of the stripper Electra in the original 1959 production of "Gypsy"-she sang the immortal lyric "If you wanna make it / Twinkle while you shake it.""
Marjorie Prime centers on hyperrealistic holographic recreations called Primes that support bereaved characters, with a holographic Walter recounting memories to Marjorie as she struggles with dementia. The play previously appeared Off Broadway in 2015 starring Lois Smith. Second Stage revives the play on Broadway at the Hayes with June Squibb as Marjorie, Cynthia Nixon as her anxious daughter Tess, and Danny Burstein as son-in-law Jon, with Anne Kauffman returning to direct. The production features an uncanny, impersonal set by Lee Jellinek with overtly futuristic kitchen cabinetry. Michelle Williams is reported to disappoint in a separate Eugene O'Neill Pulitzer Prize revival.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]