And then there were none
"The Antiquities" explores the artifacts of our own undoing
Welcome to a tour of the permanent collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities. You may be thinking Oh my! Is that at the Met? No, dearies. It’s onstage at Playwrights Horizons, the veritable Off-Broadway theater company with a buckling shelf of Tony Awards, including last season’s Stereophonic.
Yet shortly after that triumphant win, the theater company laid off five full-time staff members—a pattern affecting theaters nationwide. The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, the closest thing our arts-starved country has to a national theater, is at the precipice after the Orange Menace gutted the organization and appointed himself board chair.
This brings us back to the drama: technology advancing faster than our moral compass can recalibrate, and a veritable clown car running the show. Oh, humanity’s foibles, wouldn’t that make for a great play? The Antiquities playwright Jordan Harrison thought so, as did Vineyard Theatre and Goodman Theatre, who joined Playwrights Horizons to leverage resources and co-produce the production.
Director David Cromer harnesses an ensemble of nine character-driven actors and a century-spanning story arc into a cinematically staged montage of vignettes that whisk the audience from Mary Shelley’s fireside conception of Frankenstein to the year 2240. (hint: things don’t look so good) and back.
Unlike warp-speed technological advances such as artificial intelligence, The Antiquities is a slow burn. Sitting in a dark theater, filtered air recirculating and hazy lights drawing our eyes toward a looming apocalypse, one can’t help but squirm a bit, wondering, as a character philosophizes, “What if all of this, being a person, is the time between first sleep and second sleep?” In that case, can we all wake up?
IMC takeaway: In the early days of cell phones, I kept a receiver that had been torn from a pay phone booth next to my driver’s seat. If I happened to pull up next to another car at a stoplight, I’d pick up the phone, its gnarled wires waving emphatically, and pretend to be in a heated argument. Funny how screaming into the air feels particularly relevant right now. 📞
Craving more theater and have an extra minute? Check out our review of Redwood.
If Idina Menzel sings from a tree, will anyone on Broadway listen?
Brilliant -- a review that's so abbreviated yet works in every way. That ain't easy.