Marjorie Prime
Opening Night: December 8, 2025
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: 2st.com
It’s the age of artificial intelligence, and 86-year-old Marjorie — a jumble of disparate, fading memories — has a handsome new companion who’s programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance?
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December 8, 2025
Harrison has a dream collaborator in Kauffman, who is a master at creating emotion without hitting an audience over the head. Her approach looks as if it is detached, almost clinical, but that only means she does not overplay her hand when navigating emotional stakes. This was obvious in her last Broadway outing, the quietly devastating “Mary Jane” (2024), and so it is here, with all four actors marvelously economical — an approach that does not necessarily win awards but that lingers in audience members’ hearts and minds.
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December 8, 2025
Freshly 96, June Squibb is giving one of the sharpest and most emotionally precise performances currently onstage in the Broadway premiere of Marjorie Prime, Jordan Harrison’s one-act about an elderly widow and the lifelike robot modeled after her late husband. Exquisitely directed by Anne Kauffman, and rounded out by Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein and Christopher Lowell, it’s an intelligent prayer for raw humanity in the face of catastrophic tech complacency.
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December 8, 2025
Anne Kauffman, who helmed the 2015 off-Broadway production, directs with a steady hand and a keen sense of light and sound. Sharp blackouts barely give us time to catch our breath before we contemplate Walter’s face illuminated in a spotlight like a digital saint (Ben Stanton’s lighting is more manipulative than any AI algorithm). Daniel Kluger’s original string music is an echo from Majorie’s past (she was a violinist) that becomes increasingly adulterated with electronic distortion. These elegant design choices undergird emotionally raw performances.
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December 8, 2025
I kept waiting to feel … well, more. More rapt, more heartbroken, more rattled by the harrowing questions presented by the long, slow, terribly seductive suicide humanity seems bent on carrying out via technology. Harrison is a formidable craftsman and Marjorie Prime is built very well, but in a way it resembles one of its own artificial humans: It’s an extremely palatable version of the thing. It has studied how to be a play, and it’s a good one — if only the feeling of study weren’t quite so palpable in that goodness. If only it didn’t place so much value on the neatness of its own construction.
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December 8, 2025
From the moment June Squibb takes the stage at the Hayes Theater in “Marjorie Prime,” you feel lucky to be in her presence. The stage and screen legend is back home on Broadway, where she got her start in “Gypsy” opposite Ethel Merman in 1960, for the first time in eight years. In between being on the boards, she’s been hard at work making films, giving wonderful lead performances in “Thelma” and “Eleanor the Great.” At a spry 96 years old, Squibb is, at long last, in her title-character era.
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December 8, 2025
At its core, “Marjorie Prime” tells a simple kitchen-sink story of two adults trying to care for an aging relative. Harrison tries to up the ante by dipping into his gothic drawer of horrors to deliver not one but two suicides that push the human narrative into the contrived. In the end, the machines are more honest than the humans and, better yet, there’s none of the angst.
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December 8, 2025
Much of the pre-opening press about this revival has revolved around the 96-year-old Squibb, who might be the oldest actor ever to play a principal role on Broadway. She merits that attention with a remarkable performance that combines frostiness and fogginess into a firm coat of rime. But the other actors are equally good. Burstein, who radiates human tenderness, is perfectly employed as the play’s kindest character, and his final scene is devastating; Lowell finds the appropriate levels of stiffness and charm for his faux Walter. And Nixon is simply the best I’ve ever seen her onstage: As Tess labors to connect with her mother—or alternatively to give up any hope of connecting with her—Nixon invests her testiness with complex underlying notes of bitterness and exhaustion.
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Nixon’s Tess is vulnerable enough for you to sense the fear in her eyes, but this is an actress with a steely core and, indeed, Nixon turns on a dime when her character realizes, as I think many of us have or will, that this brave new world is short on both guardrails and moral principles. Burstein is equally effective as husband Jon, his warm eyes dancing with empathy, although we are not always so sure about that, given his programming skills. “Am I supposed not to notice she is being nicer to that thing than me?” Tess snaps at one point, bringing up another salient A.I. issue. Squibb, 96, whose Broadway career stretches back to her role as Electra in the original 1960 production of “Gypsy,” is implacably excellent. For the record, she is the oldest actress ever to open a Broadway show.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 8, 2025
For all the grief boiling over in Marjorie Prime, I walked away yearning to be more thoroughly wounded. But Harrison’s script is less interested in piercing the heart than it is the mind. It’s much too busy prodding at the bounds of humanity. What makes us who we are? How much can we rely on technology? Can it soothe us, numb us, replace us completely? Marjorie Prime offers few clear-cut answers, but does make one thing clear: There is no replacement for the power of human love and connection. And the absence of that is what keeps this show from truly leaving a mark on its crowd.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 8, 2025
What can be said here is that this Marjorie Prime, directed with restraint by Anne Kauffman (who was also behind the off-Broadway production in 2015), is both helped and hindered by its sudden relevance. It presents an intriguing and poignant suggestion of what might exist just a few decades from now, but perhaps doesn’t suggest enough. With its novelty gone, Marjorie Prime must rely more firmly on its internal mechanics, which can be creaky.
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Squibb is the marquee draw, proving once again that she’s become a national treasure (check out her wonderful performance in the recent film Eleanor the Great). She doesn’t miss a beat onstage, displaying the engaging feistiness of her screen persona but also conveying the pain of someone painfully aware of her physical and mental decline. She’s funny as well, delivering her lines with well-honed comic timing. And her sotto voce rendition of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” is worth the ticket price itself.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 8, 2025
After debuting in 2014 at the Mark Taper Forum, Marjorie Prime had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in 2015; a 2017 film featured Jon Hamm as Walter and Lois Smith reprising her stage role as Marjorie. A decade ago, the play seemed like a fascinating experiment. This remarkable revival, once again directed by Anne Kauffman, feels so much more potent. Perhaps it’s because we’re so much more conversant with AI today. We’re that much closer to achieving this concept that Harrison imagined. Or perhaps it’s because the technology is less important than the humanity of it all. The Walter onstage is first and foremost Marjorie’s late husband; the fact that he’s not flesh and blood is almost immaterial.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 8, 2025
What’s most uncanny for me about “Marjorie Prime,” though, is that the new production, especially the ending, struck me as having been revised, not necessarily for the better. Yet it turns out that the script is exactly the same (I still have the old one; I went back and checked it.) The director and most of the design team are the same as well. The show is being billed as a look at “memory, loss and AI” — I didn’t realize it would be a look at my memory too. There is still much in the play that I find clever and thought-provoking. The starry four-member cast keeps us engaged. Harrison is nothing if not prescient in the world he imagined, but perhaps some of the novelty has worn off, because the characterizations seem less sharp and the vibe more “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” unsettling than I remember feeling before.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 8, 2025
Director Anne Kauffman, who staged the play’s 2015 Off-Broadway run, has assembled an A-list ensemble that hums like a finely tuned machine. The drama is a showcase for its women, with Squibb — newly 96 and last seen on Broadway in Waitress — infusing Marjorie with an irresistible, vinegary sass. Nixon, a two-time Tony winner with 45 years of Broadway experience, is without question in her prime: wry, vulnerable, and conflicted as Tess, who struggles to connect with the real Marjorie and her Prime. In a play that now hit me fathoms deeper than it did a decade ago, hers is the performance I can’t get out of my head.
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