Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Jordan Harrison’s sleek and speculative play MARJORIE PRIME arrives on Broadway more relevant than ever

• By drediman
• December 16, 2025
• No Comments

This past weekend, I was able to catch up with Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime, which has arrived on Broadway this fall season at the Hayes Theater courtesy of Second Stage Theater. In short, the work tells the speculative story of several generations of a family who deal with the loss of their loved ones by interacting with “primes”, in essence life-like robots programmed to gather information about their subjects and mimic the personages of the beloved deceased, thereby helping to alleviate grief — at least in theory.

I first encountered the quietly devastating and inquisitive play a decade ago in an Off-Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons. With the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence in recent years, the play seems more relevant now than it was back then, particularly as it relates to the roles this rapidly advancing technology is increasingly playing in our lives. At only 80 minutes in duration, Marjorie Prime is a sleekly compact and elegantly structured play that subtly chronicles the success and limitations of such developments, as well as thought provokingly explores the endgame of the technology’s existence after the humans they were designed to help have long gone. More generally, Harrison’s musings also cast a wider conceptual net, meditating on the intangible nature of loss, memory, and consciousness — in the process gently insisting that these are inherently human traits. As with the aforementioned Playwrights Horizons’ production, director Anne Kauffman once again helms the production, giving the Broadway edition of her staging a crystallized visual aesthetic that seems to suspend it in time — perhaps to reflect the permanence of the primes? — despite the unforgiving ravages of passing time on their human counterparts.

For its Main Stem outing, Marjorie Prime has been practically perfectly cast. Although I miss the great Lois Smith in the title role, the 96-year-old June Squibb is exceptional as Marjorie and her prime, bringing layering and substantial shading to her performance, while maintaining warmth and sound theatrical projection to command a Broadway house. The pairing of Cynthia Nixon and Daniel Burstein is wrought with aching vulnerability and humanity, which starkly juxtaposes with the uncanny precision of Christopher Lowell’s performance as a first generation prime.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

MARJORIE PRIME
Broadway, Play
Second Stage Theater at the Hayes Theater
1 hour, 20 minutes (without an intermission)
Through February 15