By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Tim Fuller
From left, Marjorie (Cynthia Meier), Tess (Carley Elizabeth Preston), Walter (Ryan Parker Knox) and Jon (Matt Walley).
While Artificial Intelligence leads the list of buzz words dominating today's media, The Rogue Theatre dives straight into the deep end of the pool with “Marjorie Prime,” a demanding study on how much artificial reality it can take to hold an actual family together.
Set in the somewhat near future of 2065 or so, exhausted Marjorie (Cynthia Meier) at age 85 feels helpless to slow down the ease with which her mind is slipping away.
Spending her days tossed back and forth between frustrating surges of anger and fright, she finds little comfort in the “look-alike robot” that science has provided her – an animatronic version of her late husband Walter (Ryan Parker Knox) at about age 30, captured in the prime of his life.
Sounding and looking exactly like Walter, the figure has also been programmed to know many facts about the man's life. But while Walter can sound like he is “remembering” moments from his past, he recalls none of Walter's feelings. Science, alas, hasn't figured out how to give the machine any emotions.
On the other hand, Walter is never angry.
Providing the counterpoint in ire is Marjorie, who has no shortage of emotion based on the shrinking size of her memory. Anger is one thing she can always depend on...and she does.
But even when Marjorie is tempted to care about this high-tech version of Walter, she knows he isn't real. It also worries her that the fake Walter can remember more about her late husband's life than she can.
As a theatrical performance, the probing conversations between turbulent Marjorie and imitation Walter are brilliantly performed. Both find the true core of their characters. Within these struggles, truth takes a battering, too slippery to ever be held still for long.
Playwright Jordan Harrison has constructed “Marjorie Prime” so cleverly, and director Christopher Johnson puts so much attention to the most subtle details, we come away believing reality without a baseline can indeed exist in many shades of one's imagination.
Completing the cast are Carley Elizabeth Preston and Matt Walley as Marjorie's tense daughter Tess and her goodhearted husband Jon. Tess is equally as mercurial as her mom in abrupt mood shifts. Slipping into middle age herself, Tess faces her own dystopian dead end, forced to admit she never had a warm relationship with her mother.
Every conversation between Tess and Marjorie ends in a bickering, sputtering argument as resentment bubbles over. For both women, family life exists more in their heads than in their hearts. In one series of short bursts, Preston brilliantly leaps from crisis conclusion to crisis combustion.
We in the audience are left to ponder, does it really matter what happened in the past? Or does what we remember become more important than what actually did happen?
“Marjorie Prime” continues through March 16, with performances at various times Fridays-Sundays in The Rogue Theatre, 300 E. University Blvd. Run time is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are $47. For details and reservations, visit www.theroguetheatre.com or phone 520-551-2053.
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