THE ANTIQUITIES
Jordan Harrison's rich and unsettling parable about the post-human future gets a handsome co-production.
Exhibiting the Extinct Human Race
In “The Antiquities”, at Playwrights Horizons until February 23rd, playwright Jordan Harrison imagines a post-human world where artifacts of the human race are museum pieces, pondered over by our non-human successors.
In a series of short scenes, the story of the human race’s extinction and the rise of non-human intelligence is told through a series of exhibitions, each with its own digital time stamp. Many of these scenes feel comfortingly nostalgic as we pour over a kind of yearbook of digital breakthroughs; from the dial-up internet to the birth of artificial intelligence. Yet there is a sense of impending doom in all of the varied scenes and as the scenes are projected into the future and our fate becomes explicitly clear, the play acquires the fearsome grip of a horror story.
Although Harrison’s short scenes jump forward and back in time, they are straight-forward and quickly graspable in their theatrical form. The play is not trying to distance us with its form and language. It is trying to reach us emotionally and intellectually. And the plays feels resonant in its inexorable drive towards a non-human future, powered by greed and human passivity. I would not call it a dialectical play, it is clear that Harrison is on the side of humanity and not the machines.
The Cromer Touch
“World Building” is not as easy as it might seem, just ask the Creator. Harrison’s play has multiple levels of game-playing that are tantalizing but often frustrating in their sparseness. The curatorial language that the post-humans use in enticing us into viewing their exhibit is spot on. It is a blend of high academic and low carny barker jargon. The hint that the post-humans are telling the human story with their own biases erupts into full out anti-human propaganda at the play’s end when the human story is rewritten as a triumphant non-human origin story. Yet this intruiging layer doesn’t quite build. We get to know the post-humans only through their anti-human actions but never understand how they might persist, on what energy source or philosophy that serves to get them through eternity. And Harrison’s disparate scenes often end with a punch line and a blackout that awkwardly pushes them into sketch comedy territory.
Enter David Cromer, the U.S. stage’s greatest realist director. Cromer along with co-director Caitlin Sullivan have illuminated the vignettes of Harrison’s play with a convincing realism. Playing upwards of twenty different characters the talented cast create glimpses of believable and compelling human beings in their brief appearances and reappearances. No doubt this technique has been accomplished via a kind of shorthand but it is still an awesome thing to watch. I would love to see Cromer work his magic on other plays that stretch the imagination and play with our perception of reality like this one.
Three Theaters Co-Produce
“The Antiquities” is a co-production of three theaters: Playwrights Horizons and The Vineyard Theatre in New York City, and The Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The co-production model has been used by international opera houses because it allows them to share resources and presumably to stretch their budgets. And the physical production of “The Antiquities” has an operatic feel to it in its sculptural use of light and figures. Paul Steinberg’s scenic design, an enclosure of moving walls covered by sheet metal, is beautifully complimented by the often shimmering costume design of Brenda Abbandandolo. But the real star of the evening is the lighting designer Tyler Micoleau who turns everything we see on the stage, human and inanimate, into luminescent fetishes from a vanished world.