Contemporary American society is fast becoming an endless series of atrocities, affronts, provocations, cataclysms, and garden-variety insults to the very dignity of human life. Perhaps the clearest distillation of the contempt the ruling class has for the hoi polloi is the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, a term that encompasses a broad range of technologies we’re promised will shepherd in an era of “efficiency” and “insight” that frees us from drudgery. If history is any guide, however, the only thing we’ll be freed from is a living wage. Frankly, it’s hard to feel sanguine about the future of a society pouring ruinous amounts of energy and what might soon be the last of the potable water into an unproven, Procrustean solution to unspecified problems amidst an accelerating environmental catastrophe, profound economic inequality, and widespread democratic backsliding.
So, if you’re feeling a slight soupcon of apocalypse in the air, you’re not alone. So too is Jordan Harrison, whose new play A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities (The Antiquities for short) offers a sometimes bleak but incisive and funny look at a post-human future. A co-production among the Goodman, Playwrights Horizons, and Vineyard Theatre, the show is staged with admirable lightness by co-directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan. A uniformly strong nine-person cast plays more than 50 different roles spanning 400 years of human history. The set consists primarily of a set of shifting, stainless steel walls that give the impression of a sterile viewing room. All the production elements serve to focus the audience’s attention on the play’s ideas. At a time when so many new plays are variations on a group of characters arguing about politics, The Antiquities finds something new to say by looking toward a time past humanity.
The play’s structure is episodic, organized as if the audience is visiting the titular museum’s collection. Each vignette offers a glimpse into the human past, ranging between the years 1816 and 2240, indicated by a digital display hanging above the stage. Over the course of these moments, we see humanity’s relationship with technology evolve (devolve?) from the machine age through some sort of awful singularity that led to human extinction. This structure eschews a linear plot for a thematic look at the relationship between humanity and its machines.
Harrison engages with several big ideas throughout the play, from the ethics of museums to the morality of bioengineering. Perhaps the biggest one, however, is the extent to which technology serves as a way to transcend the inevitability of death. Many Silicon Valley tycoons today are devoting themselves to a variety of wild schemes devoted to cheating the grave, and this impulse forms much of the play’s insight. The first exhibit we see is one of the most famous setpieces in literary history: the night Mary Shelley told the ghost story that would become Frankenstein. In Harrison’s recreation, Shelley is inspired to imagine a doctor with the power to reanimate the dead after the recent loss of her own infant child.
Such images recur throughout. For instance, a young woman tells a grieving mother they can keep her dead daughter alive by continuing to update her blog. Another young woman calls her departed grandfather’s phone to hear the voicemail message she helped him set up. In one of the more striking moments, an Apple scientist literally crawls out of his own grave as time flashes back. Having just attended his funeral, we then see him engage in the most human of activities, hooking up with a new partner — in front of the robot he’s built that we know will eventually become the AIs that now run the post-human museum.
As we’re reminded throughout the play, computers see the world in a black-and-white binary. To a computer, everything is either a zero (meaning off or no) or a one (meaning on or yes). The computers who run this museum are fascinated by the amount of human life that happens somewhere between the zero and the one. The best scenes mine the thrilling ambiguity that makes human life the mysterious, frustrating, ecstatic experience that it is. As one character says to an impatient lover shortly before they consummate their flirtation, the best part is the waiting. That’s a concept that’s difficult to render in ones and zeroes.
Along similar lines, the play raises questions about when, exactly, technology will either transcend or supersede humanity. In 1910, a young boy loses a finger in a machine accident, and a coworker whittles a wooden replacement for him, joking he’s now a machine too. The Apple scientist creates a mobile robot (one of the play’s snazziest effects) that can understand human speech. A happy family eagerly waits for their dial-up internet to connect while the modem makes nostalgic screeching noises. A team of AI scientists in 2014 work to make a voice assistant accessible and friendly so that, the next year, a young boy can use it. In 2023, a tech worker demands a $380 million settlement to keep quiet about AI’s sentience. In 2031, a writer debates having a neural implant installed to help streamline her process. By 2076, we see a small group of rebels resisting forced cybernetic implantation under threat of internment in some sort of camp. The last scene chronologically, set in 2240, shows a small human settlement regressed to pre-industrialized ways and clearly headed for doom.
Harrison wisely never suggests any one of these was a point of no return. Instead, the effect is to dramatize how technology ingratiates itself into our lives. The modem noises made me fondly think back to logging into AOL to see which of my friends was available for an IM chat. Today, though, using the internet is largely frictionless but necessary for almost everything and about as much fun as looking in a Tupperware that’s been in the fridge for nine months. When did that happen?
Harrison doesn’t necessarily offer an overt solution a la Brecht (though the play’s structure definitely takes a page from the epic theatre playbook), but there are suggestions if you know where to look. The play begins and ends with our robot guides calling attention to the audience’s corporeality. They ask us, imaginatively robotic as well, to think about what it would feel like to have a body. Would we be hungry or full? What would it feel like to sink into the cushion of the seat? They describe the sensation of cool evening air raising goosebumps on skin. These speeches call us together as an audience and focus our attention on our very real shared humanity in the space of the theatre. This play is about the present and the future, grim as they may be, but being in a communal space means partaking in a cultural legacy that stretches back as far as recorded history.
The Antiquities is an unsettling play, but it’s not a hopeless one. Ironically, the English word “technology” is derived from the Greek techne, which meant “art.” Art is the only thing that makes life worth living, and no matter what anybody tells you, a machine will never be able to make it out of a line of code.
The Antiquities is presented by Goodman Theatre and is now playing at 170 N. Dearborn Street until June 1. Performance times vary; check the website at Goodman Theatre. Find more information about current plays on our Current Shows page and at theatreinchicago.com.
Highly Recommended