The playwright who saw a future that is not human

By: Alexis Soloski / The New York Times
Translation: Telegrafi.com

“I try not to write dystopia,” playwright Jordan Harrison has said. “Because it’s boring. I like to be in an ambiguous place.”

It was last Monday, his day off, and he was sitting in a bright, quiet Brooklyn coffee shop. A midday utopia and also an analogous and stimulating place to discuss Harrison’s latest work—a bittersweet anatomy of human connection mediated by technology.

In some of his recent plays, Harrison has explored what it means to be human, but never more powerfully than in the 2014 drama, Major Prime [Marjorie Prime] - which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is now showing on Broadway.

Set several decades in the future (some details from the context suggest the 2060s), Major Prime stars June Squibb as a woman in her eighties. For companionship and to stave off memory loss, she converses with a Prime—a holographic version of her late husband. Written when the conversation about generative artificial intelligence [AI] was at its quietest, the play has come to Broadway just as that conversation has become much more heated. Like all of Harrison’s plays, it is a play about mortality, and increasingly reflects his belief that technology will eventually overtake us.

“The idea that the human world is going to end, ultimately, is something that has been with me for a long time,” he said, eating a bowl of cereal. He didn’t sound sad about it.

Harrison, 48, grew up on Bainbridge Island, Washington, near Seattle, when it was still a fairly rural place and not a community inhabited by tech workers. And despite the focus of technology in his work, he has always been a late adopter — or not at all. Even now, when he lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Adam Green — the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons Theater — he remains distant from social media.

He admits that there are people in the world who have a conflict-free relationship with technology, “who don’t suffer from the way their brains felt in 1995,” he said. He is not one of them. He longs for the time when he could read a book without feeling the need to check the latest tennis scores. That time is gone.

“I am the defect, not the technology,” he said. “My inability to say no, my addictive behavior.”

He is sensitive to this addiction, at least when it comes to writing. As the last of Generation X, he has experienced the transition from the analog to the digital age. Studying English at Stanford in the 90s, he had, he says, “a front-row seat to the realization that this was going to be the world of the future and that I was starting a career in an increasingly obsolete field.”

His fascination is with human behavior being helped and hindered by the devices we have in our hands - those that exist now and those he only imagines.

"It feels like something fantastic, but everything is within reach," said Anne Kauffman, the director of Prime Minister, who has worked with Harrison for nearly 20 years. “He’s always dealing with the present, with reality, in another fantastic world that he compares it to.”

This clash between analog and digital first appeared in Harrison's 2010 drama, Futura, a thriller where printed material was almost banned. These ideas were further developed in Maple and Vine, a 2011 drama about a disillusioned married couple who abandon modern life to live in a community where it's always 1955. As one character explains: "The restrictions are a relief."

There is less relief in The Antiquities, which premiered earlier this year at Playwrights Horizons — Harrison’s longtime home. A series of short scenes about humanity’s embrace and surrender to technology begins in the 19th century with names like Mary Shelley, and ends much later when post-human beings have created the Museum of the Last Man’s Antiquities, setting up the tapes Betamax and shampoo bottles to the status of relics.

“They are prosthetics, in a way,” explains an artificial intelligence guide, “intended to make the wearer more powerful, more intelligent, more efficient, more immortal. More like us.”

When Harrison wrote the play in 2012, some moments seemed odd — like a scene where a writer worries she’ll soon be replaced by AI. Not long after, Harrison, who also writes for television, found himself among the Writers Guild protesters — in 2023, going on strike to protect screenwriting by AI. This isn’t the only example of his prediction. Maple and Vine seemed to anticipate the movement for the tradwife and, although printed material has not yet been banned, the move towards digitalization, as in Futura, has grown.

When Harrison began Major General Prime, the idea that a person could talk to a simulation of a deceased person also seemed speculative. He had just read a book about the Turing Test, a challenge in which a person tries to figure out whether the person they are talking to is human or machine. He decided to collaborate with a chatbot, leaving it up to the audience to figure out who had written what. But the chatbots available in 2012 were fairly primitive—poor playwrights. Harrison abandoned that idea, opting instead for a one-scene family drama about a woman, Marjorie; her daughter and son-in-law; and a chatbot version of her husband.

Kauffman, who directed the play in Los Angeles, had recently lost her mother. “I was very drawn to the idea of ​​continuing a conversation beyond death,” she said. She was moved and fascinated by the scope of Harrison’s imagination, something of a radical approach at the time.

Squibb, who had seen the drama when it debuted, didn’t feel she fully understood it. “I think we just weren’t ready for it,” she said. But when she was sent the script in 2025, after chatbots had become a part of everyday life, she felt she was prepared. The world had caught up with the drama.

On Broadway, Squibb plays Marjorie and later the version Marjorie Prime. She considers them to be one role, though she notes that the bot is different from the real Marjorie. Prime is more rigid, more formal. “Their goal is always to please you,” she said.

A simpler drama would have treated this goal as something evil or simply scary. Major Prime sees it as something more melancholic — as a vector of unequal belonging. “There’s something there that speaks to the encounter with inevitable loss, as a fundamental human condition,” said playwright Sarah Lunnie, who often works with Harrison. “And what’s so appealing about the idea of ​​not having any loss.”

Primates are almost human enough to ease the loss of a loved one. But, in their calmness and joy, they are no true substitute for humanity.

“Nothing is difficult for a chatbot,” Harrison says. “It doesn’t confront things, it doesn’t think about what’s right. It’s liberated from that — and that’s also a moral deficiency.”

That absence is likely to remain. In the drama, the Prime version of Marjorie’s husband, Walter (Chris Lowell), notices that their daughter, who doesn’t like Prime, is afraid of the future. “Well, that’s not a good thing,” Marjorie says. “I’ll be back soon, we better be friendly with her.”

Indeed, the technology that seemed so far away in 2014 has now arrived — capable of providing credible audio and video (if not yet holograms) of any living person. Squibb believes it can’t replicate real human emotion — at least not yet. “A human actor displays a wide range of emotions, very honest and real,” she said. “AI can’t do that.”

And, AI still can't capture the searching, painful quality of Harrison's writing—his fascination with death and the artifacts that can survive it.

“There’s a real sadness to his work, but also a wonder and appreciation for what is irreplaceable, unique, and passing us by only now—never to be recovered,” Lunnie said. “He loves life, and he’s aware all the time that he’s going to lose what he loves and that he’s going to lose himself.”

Harrison sees a time when humanity will be in the rearview mirror. “We’re not going to be here forever — we humans — and we’re going to be gone a little bit sooner than I thought when I was a kid,” he said. Of course, that’s bad news for humans. But Harrison is curious, on and off stage, about what AI will create. And besides, the future is always coming — we better be friendly with it.

“Everybody was afraid of the telephone, everybody was afraid of the television,” Harrison said. “It’s just that things will move forward. And we’ll adapt.” /Telegraph/