Five Tiny Essays About Museums
The original title of this play was A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities. Recently I shortened it to just The Antiquities. Partly this happened organically: everyone working on the production had already taken to calling it by the shorter nickname, like a kid whose name is too cumbersome. But also, I had started to feel like the old title was doing too much work for the audience. It was telling us things that we’re better off discovering during the play. So forget I even told you the original title. It’s probably already fading from your memory.
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This is the second time I’ve written about a museum. The first play was called, guilelessly, The Museum Play. It was about a museum in which the exhibits are coming back to life and escaping, and the visitors are taking their place behind the velvet ropes.
Looking back at your career, there’s the danger of forcing a tidy symmetry. But I do think it bears mentioning that The Museum Play was my first big reading at Playwrights Horizons, way back in 2003. It was my first big anything. Twenty-plus years later, I’m still hanging my hat at Playwrights Horizons, and I’m still getting museums out of my system.
That is part of the project of The Antiquities – the objects that we see in the play are both vividly alive in front of us and long-dead, both familiar and strange.
My first museum memory is of the slowly rotating food carousel in the cafeteria at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where you’d wait patiently for little bowls of chocolate pudding or French fries to circle around. A huge taxidermied elephant stood guard at the cafeteria entrance, somehow both majestic and shabby. I can still smell the humid, nutty air – “like wet things in from the rain,” as a character says in The Museum Play. It felt holy but lived in, like your grandparents’ house.
A museum is both home and somewhere strange – like the Met in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It’s an adventure that might actually be leading you inward. Think of taking the serpentine route through an exhibit, past a series of gemstones or Renaissance shrines, until you’re spat out the exit. Then you see people going in the entrance and you’re already different than them, only 20 or 30 minutes later; you’re different than you were when you walked in.
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I like an empty museum. I like a crowded museum. I like a well-heeled museum with bells and whistles, and a ramshackle, haunted, hometown museum. I like that when you go to a museum, you’re with strangers but you don’t have to talk to them. Sometimes I enjoy using museums in the wrong way, walking so fast down the hall that you cruise right by a Goya or a Monet like they’re nothing but a telephone pole. Maybe this is a way of luxuriating in being a New Yorker, daring to take things for granted.
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The museum in The Antiquities is not a museum in the way we’re used to. There is no elephant, no pudding, no Goya. No hallways to wander. Instead the exhibits come to us. To this end, Paul Steinberg’s silver box of a set is a kind of crystal ball, bringing furniture and humans into view with apparent effortlessness. In the internet age, things come to people instead of people going to things.
David Cromer, one of the Antiquities directors, says that when he passes the vitrines of priceless jewelry in the Met, he can’t help thinking about an Ancient Roman household, and someone shouting across the house “Have you seen my blue lapis earrings??? Are they in the drawer?? You know which ones I mean! The earrings with the lapis and the gold? We have to be at that thing soon!” Then 3,000 years pile up in an instant, and there they are behind glass, with a little card next to them.
That is part of the project of The Antiquities – the objects that we see in the play are both vividly alive in front of us and long-dead, both familiar and strange.
In one scene, a whistleblower at a big tech company sits in front of a pitcher of water, prophesying about how AI could spell the end of human civilization. Later in the play, we see the innocuous pitcher again – behind glass, several millennia later. The whistleblower and her prophecy are forgotten (except by those of us in the audience).
Like a museum, The Antiquities tracks the lives of objects: sometimes they remember their owners; other times they are indifferent to our brief time on the planet.
