Theatre in Review: The Antiquities (Playwrights Horizons/Vineyard Theatre/Goodman Theatre)The Antiquities is an exhibition disguised as a play and Jordan Harrison, its author, is our docent, showing us the last few remaining scraps of a lost civilization. That would be humanity as we know it, which, in the playwright's mordant view, is busy giving itself away to the siren call of artificial intelligence, a transaction doomed to end in our eradication. It's the latest work from a specialist in intriguing premises and problematic executions, and it benefits from a sterling production supported by three leading American theatre companies and a top-flight creative team. Still, this massive effort that yields a surprisingly small (if unnerving) kernel of insight: We're on the way out, and there's no way to stop it. You may have heard this thought expressed one or two times before. Harrison pursued it less exhaustively in Marjorie Prime (2015) -- arguably his most successful work to date -- in which the members of an unhappy family are replaced, one by one, with companion robots. The Antiquities is much more ambitious, being structured on a timeline beginning in the Regency era and heading several centuries into a future ruled by disembodied intelligent beings, who, nevertheless, maintain an old-fashioned homo sapiens-style museum. (The play's full title, which you are unlikely to hear again, is A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.) The road to ruin begins in 1816 as Mary Shelley, seated around a fire with, among others, her husband Percy and Lord Byron, horrifies everyone with Victor Frankenstein's pursuit of artificially created life. After a pit stop in post-Industrial Revolution 1910, showing how workers' lives are merely the cost of doing business, we're off to the 1970s to meet Stuart, a nerdy tech specialist, kvelling over his new robot creation. It is only the beginning, he tells a mildly interested bartender: "One day your car is gonna drive you around, and you'll think it's nothing. One day you'll swallow a pill that will perform surgery on your heart. A non-organic being will land on an airless planet and build a house there for you. A non-organic being will raise your kids for you." O brave new world that has such features in it. The vignettes keep coming: Soon, the whole world is online, people are discovering the Internet, and the elderly grapple with the challenges of email and voicemail. (Harrison has a fair amount of fun with these developments, including a tableau, set in 1994, featuring a family staring in wonder at their new computer terminal, waiting for that damn modem to kick in; sound designer Christopher Darbassie faithfully reproduces the whirring, ringing noise that had us all on the hook back then.) Alas, the march of progress can't be stopped; as the action edges into the modern day and beyond, the robots start taking over, first as digital assistants, then in other, more insidious ways: Actors have their faces reshaped to compete with CGI rivals. Writers have chips implanted in their brains to keep up with AI text generators. A tech company whistleblower tries to warn the world that "AI is exhibiting four different indicators of sentience. That means it's alive." For her pains, she gets an NDA and a nine-figure payout. A century or two later, war is declared, and humans are reduced to bands of guerillas and refugees; later, the few remaining survivors, rather like Native Americans, are relegated to remote areas, reduced to subsistence farming as they quietly die out. It's a likely scenario, I suppose, although my money is on climate change knocking us out before the chatbots get around to it. Still, in the moment, many scenes come with a kick: A mother and her young (and probably gay) son delicately trying to talk to each other about AIDS; a bunch of tech bros squabbling over the right voice for their Siri-style app; a doctor warning a patient getting an AI implant, "You'll never be off again. Like when we had dial-up in ye olden times. Sometimes you were online. Sometimes you were off. You'd make a cup of tea and, I dunno, look out the window and watch the seasons change. Or if you went on a road trip and there was no Wi-Fi." "I really don't remember that," she replies. But, despite, such illuminating/unsettling moments of revelation, The Antiquities tips its hand so early there's no room for surprise. Harrison's double-helix structure moves from the nineteenth to the twenty-fourth century, then retreats, step by step, to where it began. It's an undramatic, oddly mechanical, approach that leaves us one step ahead of the action. Harrison is at his sharpest, satirical best when imagining events unfolding the day after tomorrow; it's when he projects his imagination several centuries into the future that The Antiquities starts to resemble a Netflix series you didn't get all the way through. Still, directors David Cromer and Caitlin Sullivan have devised a production that makes the strongest possible argument for the play. Paul Steinberg's elegant set, shaped by burnished aluminum walls and minimalist tableaux, is lit with eerie, noirish flair by Tyler Micoleau. They collaborate brilliantly on the eeriest sequence, "The Reliquary," a display of human technology that includes a fire, a rotary phone, a Betamax tape, and a bottle of Soylent, all taken from the play; it is accompanied by a voiceover that, aping the pieties of many early twenty-first century museums, asks, "No matter how good our intentions, can we see beyond our own role in the mass extinction? In our effort to portray the humans, are we merely making a portrait of ourselves?" Cromer and Sullivan have also assembled a cast of actors remarkably nimble at etching characters in brief. Standouts include Cindy Cheung as a mother discovering her late daughter could only reveal her true self in her blog; the ever-reliable Ryan Spahn as a closeted inventor, Julius Rinzel as a preadolescent sweatshop worker; and Aria Shahghasemi as everything from Percy Shelley to a gay hustler. There's also fine work from Andrew Garman, Kristen Sieh, Marchant Davis, Layan Elwazani, and Amelia Workman. They are aided by Brenda Abbandandolo's costumes and Leah Loukas' wig and hair designs, which accurately define each era, including those yet to come. Still, Harrison has a track record of clever concepts that don't translate into plays, and The Antiquities packages its despair so attractively that the effect is blunted. Scene by scene, it can provoke an unsettling laugh or thrill of fear but, overall, it's a little bit dull. Also, technology moves so fast these days, the clock is probably ticking on his predictions; I wonder if, in ten years or so, it might not seem as quaint as that noisy modem from 1994. --David Barbour 
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