Notes on THE ANTIQUITIES

I remember an interview with Jordan Harrison about fifteen years ago in a Philadelphia paper.  I can’t find it online anymore, but I remember that Jordan was asked, “If you were to write a play that took place in a snow globe, what would it be about?” 

His reply: “It would have to be about a land where it never snows.”

Over more than two decades, Jordan has created an utterly singular collection of plays, with each entry transporting us backward and forward in time, into distinct and richly imagined landscapes where human life – its literal meaning – is examined. Taken individually, it’s hard to fathom how his plays could have come from the same writer; each entry is a unique landscape, a sharp turn from everything else he’s written. Consider a few selections from the anthology:

2002: Kid-Simple, a radio play in the flesh, a genre-bending action-fable in which a plucky teenage whiz-kid inventor named Moll journeys to a sultry fairytale forest “on the wrong side of the river.” Her invention: a machine for hearing sounds that can’t be heard.

2003: The Museum Play, in which a young, broken-hearted curator installs his ex-boyfriend as an exhibit in a natural history museum, in a desperate attempt to create an alternate reality with a better outcome.

2005: Act A Lady: In a prohibition-era town, a handful of men in a local community theater production dress up in “fancy-type women-type clothes,” and their tight-lipped Midwestern world becomes intertwined with the 19th-century French melodrama they’re rehearsing — each character we meet forced to confront a new fluidity in their gender identity, until the notion of gender itself becomes much less clear, and more mysterious.

2007: Doris to Darlene, a pop fairy-tale, charts an unexpected course from girl groups of the 1960s back to the tormented 1860s Bavarian wünderland of Richard Wagner, and then forward to the lonely yearnings of a present-day teen: three far-apart worlds drawn onto the same map, searching into one another from their isolation.

2006: Amazons and Their Men is constructed from scenes assembled like rescued film clips from the cutting room floor of an auteur film director reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl. As she attempts to make a love story, she finds it impossible to keep the horrors of the Second World War, and the fascist dictator who supports her, from invading her art.

2011: Maple and Vine, in which a present-day couple, lost amid the unbounded opportunities and choices in the contemporary city, joins an intentional community who meticulously reenact life as it was lived in 1955 — their relationship to freedom and repression becoming richer, more complex, and unnervingly satisfying.

2015: Marjorie Prime, set in the near-ish future, conjures a world where humans, after they die, can be replaced by digital versions of themselves in order to help their loved ones cope. But without the fact of our mortality, what does “life” mean? 

2018: The Amateurs is an inquiry into the role of artists in the time of crisis, set against a backdrop of the Black Death in the medieval era, and drawing a comparison to the AIDS epidemic which ravaged the gay community in Jordan’s formative years. The play carried uncanny resonance when, less than two years after its premiere, our world faced the COVID-19 pandemic.

All of Jordan’s plays invite us to cross into another world, whether it’s wholly invented, an impressionistic vision of the past, or an imagined possibility for the future. When looked at collectively, his plays reveal a writer with an ecstatic love for language, whose characters seem to wear it like a carefully considered costume; a writer whose distrust of the future is betrayed only by his relentless pursuit to understand it, and who obsessively mines the past in hopes that it may reveal some kind of logic about the present; who’s preoccupied with words, with how they scan, how they form in the mouth, how they look on a page, and with the weight they hold when sitting in a room; whose approach to each subject he takes on, however adult the subject may be, seems to somehow carry a child’s sense of wonder and awe; who remembers to us the strangeness of our world by envisioning an alternate version of it.

But Jordan’s ability to conjure worlds isn’t the end-game. As illustrated by the range of works listed above – which is not a complete list – his writing might cast us to points in the future, or to points in the past, or some other imagined universe entirely. All of these plays, however, ultimately are set on the stage where they are unfolding, on the day they are performed, in the very moment we are experiencing them. Transporting us to other worlds is a way to reveal to us something about the one we live in. 

The epigraph of The Antiquities is from Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

It’s hard not to think of The Antiquities as a kind of accumulation of his work. Set in the distant future, this play imagines a civilization that’s in search of its past – but the real setting of the play is the present, where we sit on the precipice of a new world and anxiously wonder what it will be like.  

I’m grateful to that anonymous journalist in Philadelphia fifteen years ago for prompting the snow globe metaphor: that land in a snow globe where it never snows. Jordan’s plays often share a landscape that’s deprived of the very thing it most needs (whether it’s love, sound, art, freedom, music, a mother) allowing us to see the value of that thing with renewed eyes. One way to know love for something is to feel its absence, and that longing – to retain a sense of wonder or mystery or love about the world – is what I recognize as the pursuit running through all of Jordan’s work.

I’m reminded of critic Viktor Shklovsky’s writing about art’s purpose: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life. It exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” 

I’m also reminded of The Museum Play, in which a character called Mister Everly, an aging museum curator, asks, “Do you remember learning how to look?”

The Antiquities is a continuation, and a deepening of the pursuit, in that what’s absent from its play-world is human life itself, thereby making humanity itself the subject of its inquiry. Composed of scenes of everyday human life, as imagined by our non-human successors, as if these were dioramas in the Museum of Natural History, we’re allowed a fleeting glimpse of ourselves and our humanity. 

What about “human” can never be explained? What do we long for? What do we love? What are we afraid of? How are we changing? What future are we building? How can we, in the year 2025 – a time of isolation and division, where humanity is too rarely on display – learn how to see ourselves and one another with a renewed kind of wonder?

In Act A Lady, the character Dorothy takes a stab at defining what the purpose of art is. “To me that’s art,” she says. “When you think you know how to see something but when you’re done you see it some way else.”