An Interview with Jordan Harrison
In December 2024, on the day before rehearsals began for The Antiquities, Playwrights Horizons’ Associate Artistic Director Natasha Sinha sat down with playwright Jordan Harrison to talk about the play. The following transcript of selections from that conversation contains mild spoilers, so we suggest reading it after the show.
Natasha Sinha (Associate Artistic Director, Playwrights Horizons): As a longtime Jordan Harrison fan, I feel likeThe Antiquities is leveled-up Jordan Harrison. Does it feel markedly “big” for you, alongside your other plays? (Like some of my Playwrights Horizons faves, Marjorie Prime and Maple and Vine?)
Jordan Harrison (Playwright, The Antiquities): I can't argue with the notion that it's on a different scale. Five years ago, my dear husband said to me, “You've written a lot of plays with four characters and five characters. What about taking a huge swing to the tune of nine or ten?” And of course if we’re counting characters and not actors, it’s probably upwards of 40 characters – we should count. So that was one of the first things I knew about the play – that it would be on a big canvas. I don't know that I thought “Here's supercharged Jordan Harrison,” but it's an epic squeezed into 90 minutes.
Natasha: Right, we experience a species shapeshifting (or not) over a large swath of time, in relation to technological advancements – it’s massive.
Jordan: I wouldn’t call it a sequel to Marjorie Prime, but it did occur to me recently that it picks up where that play left off. In Marjorie Prime, a family of humans is learning to coexist with these new arrivals who are post-human. And then [spoiler alert!], the final scene takes place in the far future, with the post-human beings acting out an ordinary family scene. And that’s where The Antiquities begins: we’re welcomed by two people who seem to have arms and legs and faces, but we start to realize that they’re cosplaying, really, as human beings. What do they remember about us? And so The Antiquities picks up where the previous play left off, in that sense.
Natasha: Do you think writing on this scale is changing something about how you write, or is it more that this writing is in service to this discrete story?
Jordan: I mean the scale of the whole thing is sweeping, but it's made out of sensible bites. [laughter] Many of the scenes are two pages long, and they’re often focused on small moments, little scenes you might not even remember if they were your life. Or little moments of ambivalence within a high-stakes moment. So it's not like I'm writing Gone with the Wind. In some ways, it's a bit indie movie. It's interested in minutia. The moments “between the ones and zeroes,” the directors and I have found ourselves saying.
Natasha: Yeah. So, this intimate epic is set in a post-human world and also in a museum exhibit. Are those fair ways to describe it overall, from the get-go?
Jordan: Yeah, I mean “museum,” for us, conjures wandering through halls and going to the cafeteria and holding a paper map in our hands. But the museum in The Antiquities is made by beings who don't really exist in physical space. It's a virtual space, like if you were to go into the simulation game “Second Life” and see a concert there… it’s as though you've gone somewhere, but actually you haven't left your seat. So it's a museum that artificial intelligence makes about us after we're gone. And as you've already seen, Natasha, I'm so reticent to use the term “artificial intelligence!” There's a bias in it, right? The word “artificial.” I can't imagine that in a hundred or five hundred years, computers will use that to describe themselves. But who knows? Maybe it'll stick.
Natasha: Yeah, “post-human” is the term you’ve moved toward, to be able to hold all the different angles of what you’re exploring. That change taught me something about the play. And I’ve shifted my own language to that.
Jordan: Yeah. I don't know if we're kind of showing too much of the Man Behind the Curtain by talking about this, but I remember that we had a little bit of a tug-of-war about what term to use in the play blurb. “Post-human” just has such a dark sting to it. But the longer I've worked on the play, the more I feel like I'm acclimating to the idea that we won't be the dominant species forever. I think even when I started writing this play in 2019, that thought hadn't really occurred to me. You go to school and you hear that the fish crawl out of the sea, and then they're apes, and eventually they're humans, and we're the end of the story. But it feels increasingly like we’re enjoying a golden period of dominance on the earth… and then something else will follow us.
Natasha: Whoa right, you’ve done so much deep thinking about all of this! Most of us passively hear “AI” constantly now, but “post-human” feels newer. I find I take more time to fill in the definition of things if I avoid trendy buzzwords. So “post-human” frees us to imagine more, because it’s more unknown, whereas “AI” feels kind of concrete and cold and known.
Jordan: And, when you hear “artificial intelligence,” it's still a thing we made. It's a toy we made. But in the last five years of working on the play, I've started to think of it more like a species that will follow us, as opposed to a toy we wound up.
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Natasha: Your plays delve deeply into something very human – often existential, obsessed with mortality and time – within bold structural scaffolding. How does theatrical structure come into being for you, and how do you stick with it or let it evolve as you go?
Jordan: All I can say is that a lot of playwrights know the people they're writing about right away, and I rarely do. I instead sort of see the shape that the play will take. Long long ago in another life, I was good at math. I've neglected it for 35 years, and so I can't tell you anything anymore, but there’s a vestigial part of me that could do an elegant calculus proof. I often am less concerned with what's in the scene, at least in the first draft, than with how one scene runs up against the next, how they're arranged.
Natasha: Yes, composition can evoke so much!
Jordan: I frequently find myself being satisfied by things being repeated and then altered. Suzan-Lori Parks has called it “repetition and revision.” Like in the play you meet a grandfather and a granddaughter and the granddaughter is teaching the grandfather how to leave a voicemail message on his new iPhone. The next time you see them, the grandfather is dead, and the voicemail that we recognize is what is left of him – the emotional relic of the person that we met once. The structure of the play allows me to create scenes that are both the same and different, and to have them hopefully kind of fizz and reverberate next to each other.
[*A note from Jordan, later in the process: The voicemail we hear in this production is actually the one recorded live, in the first grandfather scene – so sometimes you can hear the audience response in the message. Our lived experience as an audience itself becomes a relic, later in the play.]
Natasha: I’ve always loved how you have fun with theater. The “play” in your plays is so alive. Even in your Soundstage episode for Playwrights Horizons! You focused on a totally delightful thing about theater and somehow activated it during the pandemic… [Listen to Jordan Harrison’s Play for Any Two People on Playwrights Horizons’ Soundstage.] The way you tell the story in The Antiquities also so beautifully celebrates theater itself.
Jordan: Well, thank you. And I respond to the idea that part of what these structures are doing is giving me limits to play within, because there's nothing scarier than just being able to write about anything! And so to have the confines of going forward in time and then backward, it’s a smaller playground. I started learning about writing plays in the Brown MFA program. Paula Vogel talked about how to make an “impossible” play – a play that no theater could contain. And there’s an element of that in just about anything I write. Certainly in this one. Like, how do you squeeze all of human history into 90 minutes? It's designed to fail! There's reams and reams of human history that don't make it into this play. It's an innately biased bit of curating.
Natasha: Yes, and intentionally! Let’s talk about that in terms of one of my favorite Oscar Wilde quotes, which you use as the epigraph for the script: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
Jordan: Sure, it was my idea to make the play a kind of pyramidal shape to go forward in time and then back again – but some of the things that happen because of that are happy accidents. I like to think that on the way forward into the future, we start to realize we're tracking these inventions and these devices, and how we've as humans made ourselves obsolete by inventing the things that had the genius to surpass us. But then once we know that it's the end of human history and we've, well, lost, we go back in time slowly… and I kind of forgive and miss the humans in a different way. And I forgive the technologies as well. I start to see that they weren't just the tools for our destruction but also, for example, company for a lonely 10-year-old boy who couldn't tell his dad about the fight he just had in school.
There is a whole lot of us in these technologies. And of course it’s worth mentioning that technology has given us as much as it's taken. People thought the telephone would be the end of the texture of human existence. We've been treating every new invention of any size as the harbinger of doom for quite a long time, and yet we're still here.
Natasha: Right, new technology is worth our attention since it can help us in our daily lives. But, as we focus on what we could gain from it, maybe we don’t see what we’re losing.
Jordan: That just made me think of how I wrote the bulk of the play before AI was hitting the news in such a saturated way – there wasn’t as much research to read. And then about a year ago, I binged hundreds of AI articles I had bookmarked. I had to make sure the play wouldn’t fall behind the times – theater is so much slower than technology! And one of the things that struck me the most was that the people who are most aware of the destructive potential of AI are also the ones who are running into the future, who are pressing “Go,” who are accelerating it all. Larry Page and Elon Musk and Sam Altman and et cetera. Even though they know that it could destroy us, they somehow are constitutionally incapable of not opening the Pandora's Box.
Natasha: Is it that they can't fully imagine what opening the Pandora’s Box will lead to later, when they’re gone? And they don’t want to be careful? Or what do you think it is?
Jordan: This might be overly generous, but I think it's kind of an explorer mentality or astronaut mentality. All these magnates are obsessed with building rockets, with a new frontier. And so even if it ends up being a hellish new frontier, they want to put their flag in it. And the less generous explanation would be that it's a gold mine – that they're prospectors and they want to be the first to claim the gold.
Natasha: Sure. And when you’re in an exciting adventure mode, considering consequences isn’t a priority. Plus this is such an escalation since AI isn’t a localized frontier. I mean, even outer space seems more localized than something like this.
Jordan: That's right. Because we’re still the protagonist in space.
Natasha: Oof! And so with the Oscar Wilde quote (sorry, I’m obsessed), you're also sort of suggesting that the technology that we as humans have created, and maybe what happens because of it, is also a reflection of what we can imagine into being. Yeah?
Jordan: I guess I would describe it as: these short scenes pile up, and you start to understand that they're all linked by the presence of a new technology in each scene and that the technologies are evolving. So it's as if the post-human curators, in trying to tell the story of human beings, are actually telling the story of their own creation. But then there's the other level to the Oscar Wilde self-portraiture quote: I'm a human man. I'm a human writer, and I can't escape that bias. I don't actually know what AI will say about us in a thousand years or if they'll think about us at all. So there's something a little flattering to the play that these curators put so much care into what a human life was like in like, 1994. We should be so lucky!
But on the subject of AI and self-portraiture, a thing that we're already seeing with ChatGPT is a new genre of unnerving magazine article where a journalist talks to ChatGPT for two hours, and then the chat bot says, “Mwahaha! Going to destroy all humans!” And the reason why it's saying stuff like that is that it's learned from our science, our science fiction – for the last 90 years or all the way back to Mary Shelley, we’ve been telling compulsive stories about our creations destroying us. And so they're learning. AI is learning how to be megalomaniacs from us. [laughter]
Natasha: Ahhhh totally! Also, I've spent time thinking of that quote within the parameters of how the telling of any story informs the story itself. Like, you're starting with “White. A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities,” and you're making every single choice about the world of the story. You're choosing this tone, that pace, these characters, how they articulate an idea. And you're choosing what isn't there – that one always gets me. The omission, and how what’s missing then feeds into how we're perceiving a story.
How did you, Jordan Harrison, craft the world of this play? What is in it and what isn't, for a play that is ostensibly capturing the end of human history through data and rudimentary understanding of emotions and soul and time and how time feels on us and all of that?
Jordan: I don't know if this is a direct answer, but it's where you send me… The longer I think about the quote, at first it sounds like it could be a criticism. But I don't know, I think Wilde is praising it. It's like if you spend long enough on a piece of art and you're making thousands and thousands of choices, then how can you escape including your own experience? That's exactly the sort of art that we wonder whether AI can pull off or not. So when I look at the scenes in this play, there's no scene of a sweatshop making iPhones in China, right? I can think of what the scenes would be if the mission was just neutrally to create a story of technology evolving. Instead, there's a scene of, again, a 10-year-old boy talking to Alexa, and that's directly inspired by my nephew, Wilder, and a conversation he had with his mom about how polite or not polite to be with an AI program – that you should still be a little nice, but not as nice as you are to a human. Navigating that kind of confusion for a kid growing up is something that's personal to me, and that's why it made it into the play. So I guess I can feel both ways. I can feel embarrassed that the reach of the play is biased towards a guy who grew up in a white family in Seattle and went to school in California in the ‘90s, but also, that's what I have to give. There's hopefully a generosity in that specificity.
Natasha: 100%! That lack of neutrality and that embarrassment, that's part of being human. That's a thing you're trying to hold with the project of this play, right? Like, it isn’t an error – it’s the point. Those are the things that would not be able to be reflected if you (or a chat bot?) set out to simply write a “factual” account of human history. Feels like that’s the point: to imprint yourself onto the play so that it’s made by you – one specific human who is certain of things and isn’t other things, who has had certain experiences and not others. If you gave literally the same exact play premise to 10 other playwrights, we’d have 10 vastly different plays.
Jordan: Right, we could give the same mission to 10 other playwrights, or we could give it to 10 chatbot programs. I mean, the thing that I said a lot when Playwrights produced Marjorie Prime is that my original intention had been to write a two-hander play where I wrote one of the characters and a chatbot wrote the other character, and in theory, the audience wouldn't know who is who. But the technology was not nearly capable of that in 2012. Now, it certainly is. So that's a good question to pose: I could have actually had a computer write this play, so why did I write it? I guess I am a believer in embarrassment and ambivalence, and I can be embarrassed and ambivalent that it's from one voice, but supposed to contain all voices.
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Natasha: What are you looking for in rehearsals as you hear the play now, close to when we will finally see it on stage?
Jordan: I think when I set out to write the play, I thought that it would be more about the kind of comic misunderstandings of everything that AI doesn't understand about us. I thought it would be a play where they think that C-3PO was our god. Like, there's that scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy where the Coca-Cola can becomes a kind of idol. And I think that's the first thing I was thinking of. And in the writing of the play, and then in the workshopping and rehearsing of the play, it feels like everything has actually pulled it towards the fact that the computers actually understand quite a lot about us, and they aren't even that different from us. They know what they don't know: death and childbirth and sex, and the feeling of being a mother or a father. They know their blind spots, but in general, they paint a very nuanced and accurate portrait of us. And so I guess in rehearsing the play, I want to forget that we're looking at these scenes from 2000 years in the future. When you're watching a single mom at home talking to her kid about death, it's like for the few minutes of that scene, you want to kind of slip into that immediate human experience. And then as soon as the scene ends and you're onto something else, you're on a new tiny little planet under the Milky Way, and all those people that you just got to know are dead.
The scenes within the play want to be as warm as possible because the frame around it is so cold. I think that's a trick for the actors: what to do with the knowledge that they’re not a troupe of human actors. How do you play a robot, or a cluster of pixels? This came up during Marjorie Prime because it could stick in your head somewhere when you're the actor: “I am not an organic being.” So am I supposed to cry badly? Am I supposed to not understand when my scene partner is having emotions? I think the trick is to let that go and to let us love the humans when they're in front of us.
Natasha: Yeah, tough to not fixate on that, especially as AI is so present all around us now... In a world overly saturated with AI articles and conversations, are there other works of art – whether about AI or not at all – that you think are in conversation with this play? You've talked about news articles and how museum exhibits work – what else feels significant for you?
Jordan: I mean, certainly the play owes a ton to Thornton Wilder and to Our Town in particular. And maybe it comes to mind so quickly because I'm working with a director who did such an indelible and superb production of Our Town. But that morning of Emily’s 12th birthday, and the smell of bacon… to see that from the cemetery is one of the projects of the play. Each of those scenes wants to feel like your 12th birthday with bacon cooking – the immediacy of that. So yeah, the abstraction of Wilder mixed with the kind of normalcy of what he's putting on stage emotionally? That's something I've always loved. And it has seeped into my bones.