Marjorie Prime

Marjorie Prime, a gloomy drama about Artificial Intelligence (AI) by Jordan Harrison, is receiving its world premiere at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. Harrison focuses less on the powers of technological advancement and more on universal problems of human interaction that — if the play is be believed — no amount of computer tinkering can address. Set in an antiseptic suburban living room with an enormous video screen backdrop that is never utilized, director Les Waters' production is quiet without ever being disquieting, which is problematic.

Though the cast members — Lois Smith, Lisa Emery, Jeff Ward, and Frank Wood — are mostly effective, their characters too often feel like devices that playwright Harrison is employing to make a statement about the dangers and limitations of technology.

The title character (played by Lois Smith) is an 85-year-old woman who doesn't move around much and whose memory is deteriorating. Marjorie's daughter Tess (Lisa Emery) finds it difficult to watch her mother's decline. Tess and her proactive husband, Jon (Frank Wood), have enlisted a Prime, a computerized re-creation of Marjorie's deceased husband, Walter (Jeff Ward), to interact with her on a daily basis and to help jog Marjorie's fading memory.

"Walter Prime" appears as Marjorie knew him, as a young man, and he's eternally kind and patient. Since the Prime is programmed by other people (it can also talk to and learn from other Primes), Tess and Jon can essentially delete certain events from Marjorie's life that they don't want her to remember, a practice that sits more comfortably with Tess than with Jon. Human-Prime interaction never seems to take place with a third person in the room. Walters' scenes feel like we're watching somewhat futuristic encounters of everyday domesticity.

Primes cannot stave off death, and they have other rather surprising uses besides this high-tech hospice work that Tess and Jon are employing — because if they didn’t, Marjorie Prime would run about 45 minutes in length.

Emery smartly steers the performance away from exposed-nerve hysteria. Her work makes Tess' descent into depression even more disturbing to witness than Marjorie's mental atrophy. Playing a man trying to cope with of the unraveling of both his mother-in-law and his wife, Wood is quietly marvelous. Smith, a veteran character actress whose career dates back to 1952, asks for no sympathy. She offers up a nicely realized depiction of a once complicated woman whom age and dementia have made simpler. Ward takes Walter Prime in some intriguing directions as well. Primes are not emotional, but they employ bits of humor and are curious, and Ward's character is no automaton.

Harrison clearly feels that memory-reshaping is psychologically disquieting even when it is done in the name of mercy. Consequently, the play has a certain amount of thematically underlined dialogue that Emery and Wood do their best to keep from being overly didactic. Marjorie Prime runs a lean — sometimes overly thin — 95 minutes, and the play's final scene feels like a theoretical dream sequence in which we are given a glimpse of a Prime acquiring new information — rebooting perhaps.

When the Prime announces, "I'm afraid I don't have that information," the long silence that follows offers a glimpse into an uneasy future, Primed or otherwise.