Left to Right: Rosemary Regan (Marjorie) and Kimberly Gilbert (Tess). Photo by DJ Corey Photography.
“What does memory look like to you?” asks director Jason Tamborini. We have things that help us preserve our memories: photographs, scrapbooks of past adventures and accomplishments, specific songs or pieces of music, old greeting cards marking past celebrations, and drives through familiar neighborhoods. But what if we had something or someone who continually listened as we retold our stories, responded with affirmation, and encouraged us to dwell in the happy places of our past? In Jordan Harrison’s play, a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize, we have that opportunity in the not-too-distant future in the form of “primes.” A prime is more than a hologram or a conventionally helpful robot. It is an almost human recreation of someone who has died. A prime seems intended to help process our grief over the loss of a specific person and to help ease us through our own aging.
…alternately lovely, poetic, compelling, and achingly sad.
The play opens with 85-year-old Marjorie (Rosemary Regan) sitting in her living room speaking with a young man seated on the couch, Walter (Gabriel Alejandro). Immediately we know something is strange about Walter. He is too calm, too solicitous, and too knowing. We soon learn he is Marjorie’s husband, or rather her husband at age 35. Is he a ghost she has envisioned to keep her company? No, he is Walter Prime, supplied through technology, to help Marjorie cope with incipient dementia. Regan’s Marjorie was a delightful firecracker in her youth and still is until an errant sad memory gets in the way. This memory is preserved, unprocessed by Marjorie herself. Walter Prime “knows” only the good things Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law have encoded in him.
Daughter Tess (Kimberly Gilbert) is a bundle of anxiety about her mother’s condition, family history, and her own absent children. She is skeptical of the prime and feels her mother should be offered more reality and less of the “human morphine” of the prime. Tess’s husband, Jon (Sam Lunay), is loving, kind, and patient despite Tess’s increasing depression. So what if he drops in a few embellishments to the memories enshrined in the prime? If it makes Marjorie happier, where is the harm? Where the harm may be found is a central question of the play. Should Marjorie be allowed to die “happily” without ever addressing issues remaining between her and Tess?
This short play captures many complexities of contemporary middle-class life. Tess refers to the family as “West Coast WASPS”—ungrounded by religious faith, distrustful of, but dependent upon, technology, struggling to maintain personal relationships, incomprehensibly unhappy, and totally unprepared for death. The joyless Tess seems to question the very purpose of going through life. “How nice that I could love someone,” says Marjorie finally. Perhaps that is the only purpose there is. The production smoothly captures the shifting shape of memory and our existential dread in the excellent performances by all four actors and the production elements. The lovely set designed by Sarah Reed feels somewhere in between the longtime family home and an assisted living facility. Marjory Hartman’s beautiful lighting perfectly captures the passage of time as well as the changing emotional landscape.
“Marjorie Prime” is alternately lovely, poetic, compelling and achingly sad. The play seemed to be completed in the blink of an eye—rather like life itself.
Running Time: One hour and 30 minutes with no intermission.
Advisory: Depictions and/or discussions of dementia, grief, and suicide
“Marjorie Prime” runs through May 19, 2024 at Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street, NE Washington, DC 20002. Performances are Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. FOr more information and to purchase tickets, go online.
