What happens to our memories, the wonderful and the terrible, after they fade? Will others we shared them with remember the glorious or painful details well enough for us, or must our memories simply die with us, never to be recalled or told again? Marjorie Prime on Broadway wastes no time, ahem, asking these very questions not only of the Oscar-worthy cast, but of the audience, too.
Written by Jordan Harrison and directed by Anne Kauffman, Marjorie Prime is a ninety-minute drama with the kind of slow-burn grief that only comes with that of dementia. The phenomenal June Squibb is Marjorie, the lead character at the center of the story. Sharp as a tack herself at a ripe young age of 96, Squibb’s “Marjorie” portrayal is a mighty one, as a grandmother with Alzheimer’s who playfully but purposefully pokes fun at the seriousness of losing one’s mind. Marjorie’s daughter, Tess, played by the righteous Cynthia Nixon with the kind of sincere conviction you can expect from her today, unsurprisingly finds nothing funny about her mother’s memory loss, which can only mean she’s in for a larger loss to follow.
Tess’s husband, Jon, played by stage and television star, Danny Burstein, is the loving and loyal glue that helps bind the sticky bonds of his wife and mother-in-law as they collectively brace for the next life chapter to come. And then there’s the gracious and most charming Christopher Lowell, who plays Walter, Marjorie’s sci-fi companion who is a hologram of her late husband. This is where the “Prime” comes in. We meet Walter as a young adult man sweetly rehashing fond memories of yore with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. But it’s not long before you realize that Walter is perhaps an AI companion whose only use is to keep the living entertained with past tales that are either tall or taut, depending entirely on who you ask. In Walter’s case, all his memories have been trained by Tess and therefore told with edited outcomes for her mother.
The story of Marjorie Prime on Broadway will be a familiar tale for so many who have slowly lost a loved one twice. Once when their memory of you fades but they are still physically here, and then a final time when they physically fade away entirely. But this isn’t solely another story of slow grief followed by inevitable loss. Marjorie Prime dares us all to ask ourselves how we remember our own stories and how we choose to tell them. Do we sterilize the bad stories with better outcomes? Because hey, if we don’t remember how it went anyway, why not simply retell it with a better narrative? And is it better for those who can’t recall their own memories to go ahead and bend their truth for them, to make a recollection worth reliving?
See Marjorie Prime at New York’s lovely Hayes Theater before it closes on February 15. And don’t forget to ask yourself how you’d prefer your best, and worst, memories told when you’re no longer around to tell them. Tickets at 2st.com/shows/marjorie-prime
