The Antiquities Off-Broadway Reviews

Some of these scenes are beautifully drawn, with the wit, pith and undercurrent of sadness characteristic of Harrison’s best work. (The opportunities and perils of A.I. as human companions were the subject of his play “Marjorie Prime,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2015.) The boy who gets the prosthetic finger is left at the workhouse because his family can no longer afford him. (Father to son: “Well. Goodbye, Tom. I don’t expect I’ll see you again.”) The reason the 1987 boy is grieving is that his bachelor uncle was buried that day. We don’t need to be told what he died of. But other scenes, like one set in 2076, when the last humans live as outlaws in a dystopia of semi-robot overlords, feel more like place fillers, necessary as steps in Harrison’s timeline but not compelling in themselves.

It’s a pity: The Antiquities is a compelling concept and Harrison has a poetic, philosophical bent, but the execution lacks a certain audacity. One wonders what Caryl Churchill would have made of the premise (as with Love and Information, she’s master of the short, sharp shock). Not even a tightly directed cast and boldly designed production can overcome the sense that we’ve seen these tropes before on screens.

At its core, “Prime” asks what it means to be human, and how that is affected by time and our surroundings, a theme that Mr. Harrison has explored in various other works; one of his most recent, “The Amateurs,” unfolds during the Black Plague. His latest venture, “The Antiquities,” brings us back to the future, to a post-“Prime” era — and it offers an even more chilling perspective on where technology may be taking us.

There are then three increasingly dystopian scenes in the future, before the one displaying the artifacts.After that, “The Antiquities” backtracks, going back to the previous stories and finishing them up. This is surely well-meaning, an effort to give us fuller stories rather than just a theme, and some of the individual stories do wrap up in a satisfying way. But it all started to feel too much. “The Antiquities,” which imagines a future in which human beings are no longer welcome by the creatures they created, started to outwear its own.

The Antiquities is a most perceptive and hauntingly cautionary tale, and it owes much to the production values crafted by the entire creative team. Each of the exhibits, expertly staged by co-directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, captures just the right sense of otherworldliness, very much like a “Twilight Zone” episode. And it’s all greatly enhanced by Tyler Micoleau’s muted lighting and Paul Steinberg’s minimalist settings.

Running 100 minutes without intermission, The Antiquities gets credit for conceptual creativity and topicality. Even though it doesn’t break new ground when it comes to the power and perils of technology, it grips with a quiet urgency.

The play’s episodic structure results in inevitable choppiness, with some vignettes landing harder than others. The back-and-forth chronology, with later scenes sometimes bookending earlier ones, can prove confusing. But under the precise direction of David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan, The Antiquities proves a provocative cautionary tale, not that one was needed, about how we may not always be able to fully control the technology that seems to be advancing with dizzying speed. The writing is consistently clever, such as the tiny mistakes the characters sometimes make when emulating human behavior that they never experienced firsthand.

The full title of this remarkable, thought-provoking show — A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities — tips us off to the bleakness of Harrison’s vision for humanity’s ability to survive the current technological revolution. It also clues us into the buttoned-up formality of his approach to the subject matter, which is built on a series of about two dozen scenes that proceed chronologically from the early 19th century through 2240, and then reverse direction so that we revisit the same characters and settings from a new perspective.

Don’t bother! Harrison makes it clear that such actions would merely be performative. Indeed, one can’t really argue that “The Antiquities” is a cautionary tale. There’s no question that artificial intelligence is here to stay; all that’s left for us to discover is whether Harrison’s dire predictions about the future of the human race – and technology’s part in making it happen -- will come true or turn out to be mere figments of the playwright’s vivid imagination.

I saw What the Constitution Means to Me on the day Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018. At the time, I said, “I started out not wanting this review to be entirely about politics, or at least not about my politics. But the show—like America right now—blends the personal and the political in ways that are as inextricable as the conversations I can’t seem to stop having.” I can’t help having some of those same emotions right now.