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The Antiquities Puts Humanity in a Museum Display Case
The robots memorialize us in Jordan Harrison’s time-hopping speculative drama.
Like a rock skipping across a lake, we touch down with factory employees in the early 20th century and a computer programmer in the 1970s, up through the Y2K-era rise of the internet and those bumbling-but-maybe-not 2010s tech bros. Then the exhibit barrels forward into our putative downfall, as machine learning starts to replace acting and writing (seen in an unnerving Hollywood conversation in 2031), and then sets its sights on eradicating us messy flesh beings altogether. This is a tripartite production of Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater, and the Goodman, and the ace ensemble includes Cindy Cheung, Marchánt Davis, Layan Elwazani, Andrew Garman, Julius Rinzel, Aria Shaghasemi, Kristen Sieh, Ryan Spahn, and Amelia Workman. The characters emerge as nervous parents and wounded children, disconnected from each other, ladling the energy they can’t adequately channel into human connection instead into these objects, physical or entirely electronic, a coder’s prototype robot, a daughter’s web-blog, a grandfather’s voicemail message.
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