About the Play:

Marjorie Prime was a Finalist for 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Marjorie Prime is a full-length drama by Jordan Harrison. Eighty-five-year-old Marjorie, grappling with fading memories, receives help from a handsome new companion who's programmed to feed back only the best stories of her life. But given the chance, what would we remember, what would we forget?

Marjorie Prime is set in the not-too-distant future when artificial intelligence is deeply embedded in our daily lives, providing entertainment, care and comfort to humans, and 85-year-old Marjorie is a jumble of disparate, fading memories. That is until the appearance of Walter, a mysterious and charming young visitor programmed to help Marjorie uncover the intricacies of her own past. With help from an intriguingly innovative technology, Marjorie examines her past, sometimes replacing her realities with idealized memories. Through deeply drawn characters – both real and in the form of artificial intelligence companions, or "Primes" – Jordan Harrison burrows into troubling questions of the digital age: What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the power of authorship? Will we be any less human, once computers know us better than we know ourselves? This wondrous, touching, and clever play explores the mysteries of human identity, collective family memory, and the limits – if any – of what technology can replace.

Marjorie Prime premiered in 2014 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, had its New York premiere off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, and was a Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play has been performed in regional repertory, fringe festival, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 women, 2 men

What people say:

"Jordan Harrison's elegant, thoughtful and quietly unsettling drama… keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you have seen it...At some point, you realize that it's been landing skillfully targeted punch after punch, right where it hurts." — The New York Times

"An elegant study of memory as both escape and prison. In Anne Kauffman's perfectly chilled yet cozy staging, the human parts of Harrison's smart, lovely play are built to last." — Time Out New York

"Jordan Harrison's play…has all the hallmarks of the best science fiction; it's clever in conceit, alive with humor, surprising in its turns, and terribly haunting by the time the lights go out." — The New Yorker

"Marjorie Prime…is primarily concerned with something eternal: the way our humanity is shaped and warped by the mysterious ebbs and flows of memory." — Los Angeles Times

"Memory is an essential element of life – crucial to thought, feeling, progress, identity. But it also comes into play with particular power and meaning after someone who has been loved dies. And it is this tension between life and death – with memory functioning as connective tissue – that animates Jordan Harrison's subtly shattering play, Marjorie Prime." — Chicago Sun-Times

About the Playwright:

Jordan Harrison is an American playwright and screenwriter who grew up on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the Brown MFA program. For three seasons, he was a writer and producer for the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black.