Jordan Harrison’s plays examine human bonds as AI technologies advance

Jordan Harrison’s 2014 play Marjorie Prime, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is now on Broadway. Set some decades in the future (context clues suggest the 2060s), the play stars June Squibb as a woman in her 80s who, for companionship and to stave off memory loss, chats with a Prime, a holograph version of her late husband.

Harrison, 48, has built a body of work described as sweet-bitter anatomies of human connection mediated through technology that he says may eventually supersede us. "I try not to write dystopia," he said, "because it’s boring. I like to sit in an ambivalent place." He told the reporter he is a late or non-adopter of gadgets, remains a social media holdout and lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Adam Greenfield, the artistic director of Playwrights Horizons.

Earlier plays have explored this friction between analog and digital life. Futura (2010) imagined a world where printed matter is nearly outlawed; Maple and Vine (2011) follows a couple who move to a community frozen in 1955. The Antiquities, which premiered in 2025 at Playwrights Horizons, spans the 19th century to a future Museum of Late Human Antiquities.

Director Anne Kauffman said of Harrison’s work, "It feels fantastical, but all of it is within reach." Marjorie Prime treats the Primes as almost human but not whole: Squibb said a human actor shows "a sense of a wide range of emotions and very honest, true emotions," and Harrison noted, "Nothing is difficult for a chatbot.

Key Topics

Culture, Jordan Harrison, Marjorie Prime, June Squibb, Playwrights Horizons, Anne Kauffman