I’ve known Jordan Harrison for over twenty years. Like me, he began his association with Playwrights Horizons as a literary intern, and then he entered Brown’s prestigious MFA playwriting program under Paula Vogel’s vaunted tutelage. By the time he graduated from Brown, he had already accumulated an impressive body of work, clearly the handiwork of a purebred theater geek. Unconventional narratives, fluid time structures, eccentric characters, and brainy themes abound; but most importantly, he creates purely theatrical worlds that could not possibly exist in any other media. I produced four of his plays while I was artistic director at Playwrights and am so proud of his steady growth in that time. But I am especially proud of the confidence he attained which has emboldened him to assay ever more audacious and intricate formal structures.

Jordan’s latest play, The Antiquities, is in many respects, his most formally ambitious play yet. Like Jordan’s masterpiece, Marjorie Prime, it considers the effects of AI on humanity’s future, but The Antiquities’ point of view is more harrowing. The play starts in the early 1800s, then takes us bit by bit ever closer to the present, then skips forward inexorably to a humanless future. But Jordan does not seem intent on concocting a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting AI take over our lives. That interpretation, especially in light of his other work, seems a bit obvious. No, I think the play asks us to look a bit deeper, to give it a second look. And that’s exactly what the play itself does — when it reaches its midway point, it reverses course and revisits the scenes from the first part. We begin to see things anew, and consider the telling clue to unlocking the play he leaves us in the play’s epitaph, a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” That is to say, I’ve always found the key to Jordan’s work lies in its humanity, not its formalism.

After repeated viewings, I’ve found that the most intriguing question the play raises stems from the purposeful ambiguity regarding its authorship.  Did a computer write this play, but in the voice of a human it can only hypothesize? Or was it written by a human imagining the narrative of its own extinction? Death is everywhere in this play, often portrayed as the fundamental anxiety and defect of being human. But just as often, it portrays death as the source of all human wonder and invention. I sometimes wonder  if the inspiration for the play came from Jordan’s desire to write a play that a computer wouldn’t “think” to write. Computers never die, say the anxious people and their computers. But then, neither does a play. And it’s hard to imagine anything other than a human voicing the ecstatic, transfiguring ode to life expressed by the sublime, adventurous Claire in the play’s final scene. The Antiquities: take your time with it. We’ve only scratched the surface.