‘Come for the AI, stay for the human drama’: Trunk Theatre brings Marjorie Prime to the Varscona

Amy DeFelice didn’t know this. When you phone her cell, as I did this week, a glossy automated voice intervenes, to ask you to state your name and the reason for your call. “And I’ll see if this person is available.”

To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

She was. And we were both astonished to learn that an AI secretary, of sorts, had somehow infiltrated her life. What makes it downright eerie is the coincidence that DeFelice is directing a play, opening Friday on the Varscona stage in a Trunk Theatre production, that’s all about AI and humans and their changing relationship.

In Marjorie Prime, by the Pulitzer-nominated American playwright Jordan Harrison, the 85-year-old woman of the title is chatting to her long-dead husband — the AI version of him at age 30, that is — in 2065. And as Marjorie’s memory bank gradually dwindles with age, Walter Prime, a product of Senior Serenity Corp, is there to shore up, and possibly enhance, the remains, sympathetically, with cues and reminders from her life. “Companionship,” says her son-in-law, “is better than television.”

In that our memory fades, and we’re less ‘ourselves’, is our relationship with AI really a depletion of what’s human about us? You could argue the reverse. Is it progress to replace the bad bits of memory with better bits, curated in the course of aging in order to provide comfort amid the losses of life? Marjorie Prime wonders about disturbing things like that. DeFelice’s working catchphrase is “come for the AI, stay for the human drama.”

Maureen Rooney in Marjorie Prime, Trunk Theatre. Photo supplied

As she points out, in the decade since Marjorie Prime premiered Off-Broadway (it was remounted for Broadway last fall), it’s become a rare example of a prescient play that has not only not lost ground but actually become more topical in the course of time. What might have struck audiences as out-there sci-fi fantasy in 2015 is happening all around us, unnervingly, every day. AI programs designed to sense your mood, keep you company, and relieve your particular stresses already exist.

“The technology has caught up,” says DeFelice . Audiences will see Marjorie Prime differently in 2026, she argues. “They’re more suspicious— of surveillance culture, of data harvesting, chatbot therapy, identity theft, voice impersonation, etc. — all happening in the real world now. “The technology is has moved faster than time..”

As an example of the technological advances that blur the frontier that separates humans from the creations they load with human-ness, DeFelice, who’s an indefatigable researcher, points to the Loebner Prize (it ended in 2019), which was designed to award the most human-like computer programs. And in an AI/ human face-off, the judges couldn’t make the distinction. A validation of sophisticated technology that is disturbing at least.

In an age of AI “What is it to be human?” that’s the question, says DeFelice. And it’s one that threads through the play. “Marjorie over-writes memories with her own versions,” better, more positive ones. What, then, of past trauma? Should that be loaded into AI companions, too?. As DeFelice describes, Marjorie’s daughter (Sue Huff) and son-in-law (Troy O’Donnell) disagree. “One says ‘just go with it’. And one argues ‘let’s remind her of who she is’,” trauma and all. “How do we process the harder things in life?” DeFelice asks, on behalf of the play. “And there isn’t one right answer.”

“I think it was timing,” says DeFelice of the coup of acquiring rights to the play that’s been “on my list” — a DeFelice signature phrase she’s inherited from her actor/director/mentor father, the late great Jim DeFelice. She applied just before the Broadway remount of last October.

Trunk Theatre has a history of bringing Edmonton audiences challenging properties from across the border or the pond we might not see at other theatres. Playwrights like Sarah Ruhl, David Harrower, Mark O’Rowe, Nick Payne are in the Trunk trunk. DeFelice’s own attraction to Marjorie Prime included her feeling that “it’s a different (theatre) experience than I’ve seen,” and the “meaty roles, complicated characters” it provides for four actors. “As I age I think about aging.”

It’s a really packed 85 (intermission-less) minutes,” DeFelice says of a play to which everyone will bring their own experiences of grief and memory, of being a caretaker, of weighing fantasy vs. reality. If you could have a version of someone you’ve loved and lost,  someone loaded with the memories of your lives together, would you buy in?

PREVIEW

Marjorie Prime

Theatre: Trunk Theatre

Written by: Jordan Harrison

Directed by: Amy DeFelice

Starring: Maureen Rooney, Ben Kuchera, Sue Huff, Troy O’Donnell

Where: Varscona Theatre

Running: through April 19

Tickets: varsconatheatre.com