Marjorie Prime (TCG Edition)

Jordan Harrison

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781559365246
• eBook ISBN: 9781559368490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

 

Now a major motion picture starring Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and Tim Robbins.

 

“An elegant, thoughtful and quietly unsettling drama. Marjorie Primeoperates by stealth… at some point, you realize that it’s been landing skillfully targeted punch after punch, right where it hurts… It keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you have seen it.”

—Ben Brantley, New York Times

 

“Brilliant…A startling and profound new drama.” —Jesse Green, New York

 

“Memory is an essential element of life—crucial to thought, feeling, progress, identity. But it also comes into play with particular power and meaning after someone who has been loved dies. And it is this tension between life and death—with memory functioning as connective tissue—that animates Jordan Harrison’s subtly shattering, Marjorie Prime.” —Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

 

“Jordan Harrison’s play has all the hallmarks of the best science fiction; it’s clever in conceit, alive with humor, surprising in its turns, and terribly haunting by the time the lights go out.”

—Rollo Romig, New Yorker

 

With help from an intriguingly innovative technology in a future not far from our present, Marjorie examines her past, sometimes replacing her realities with idealized memories. Through deeply drawn characters—both real and in the form of artificial intelligence companions, or “Primes” —Harrison burrows into troubling questions of the digital age: What would we remember, and what would we forget, given the power of authorship? Will we be any less human, once computers know us better than we know ourselves?

 

Jordan Harrison grew up on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. His plays include Maple and Vine, The Grown-Up, Doris to Darlene, Amazons and Their Men, Finn in the Underworld, Act a Lady, Kid-Simple, and Futura. Harrison is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Kesselring Prize, and the Horton Foote Prize, among other awards. He was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime. A graduate of the Brown MFA program, Harrison is a writer-producer for the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black.

PART ONE

1

Tess and Jon’s living room. On one side of the room, we can see an entryway beyond the open kitchen. On the other side, there is a hallway leading off to the unseen bedrooms.

Marjorie, eighty-five, sits in a recliner. (The lumpy chair doesn’t go with the rest of the decor—clearly it’s been added for her comfort.) Marjorie’s visitor, Walter, looks like a young career man from 1998. He seems to be in his early thirties—bright-eyed and handsome in an unspectacular way.

MARJORIE: I feel like I have to perform around you.

WALTER: Well you don’t.

MARJORIE: I know.

WALTER: It’s just me, it’s just Walter.

MARJORIE: Maybe it isn’t bad, if I feel that way. (Beat) I used to entertain a lot.

WALTER: I remember.

MARJORIE: You do?

(He sees the sink.)

WALTER: Marjorie. Where are the dishes?

MARJORIE: The girl did them.

WALTER: She doesn’t come ’til two.

MARJORIE: I did them.

WALTER: You didn’t. Your arthritis.

MARJORIE: I had a good day. (She holds her hand up, opening and closing it with apparent ease) Look.

WALTER: Marjorie, we both know what no dishes means.

MARJORIE: It means I haven’t been eating.

WALTER: Even a spoonful of peanut butter.

MARJORIE: I’m not hungry. It’s their fault. Feeding me those pills.

WALTER: The pills are their fault?

MARJORIE: Yes.

WALTER: Or your doctor.

(Marjorie absently rubs the hand that she opened and closed.)

MARJORIE (Pouty): Maybe if she got Jif.

WALTER: Maybe if / she?—

MARJORIE: She always gets the kind you have to stir or there’s an oil slick on top. And she calls that healthy.

WALTER (Coaxing): Even a spoonful.

MARJORIE: You sound like them.

WALTER: I sound like whoever I talk to.

(The feeling of an uncomfortable truth.)

MARJORIE: Let’s talk about something else.

WALTER: I could tell you a story. You liked that the last time.

MARJORIE: I’ll have to take your word for it.

WALTER: I could tell you about the time we went to the movies.

MARJORIE: We went to a lot of movies.

WALTER (Does she remember the significance?): But one time we saw My Best Friend’s Wedding.

MARJORIE (She doesn’t remember): My Best Friend’s Wedding . . .

WALTER: There’s a woman—Julia Roberts. For a while it was always Julia Roberts. And she has an agreement with her best friend, her male best friend, that if they’re not married by a certain age, then they’ll marry each other. And she’s about to remind him of the agreement but it turns out he’s already fallen in love with this nice blond—Cameron Diaz. And so Julia Roberts spends the whole movie trying to ruin things between her friend and Cameron Diaz, which is not very sympathetic behavior for America’s Sweetheart. But it’s all okay in the end, and she has a gay best friend who delivers one-liners.

MARJORIE: Did I like it?

WALTER: You said you wanted a gay best friend afterwards.

MARJORIE: Did I get one?

WALTER (Faintly generic): I’m afraid I don’t have that information.

(Pause. She scrutinizes him.)

MARJORIE: Why did you pick that story? Why did you pick My Best Friend’s Wedding?

WALTER: It’s the night I proposed to you.

MARJORIE: Oh Marjorie, the things you forget.

You were trying to tell me and I wouldn’t let you.

WALTER: That’s all right.

(Short pause.)

MARJORIE: Kind of unfortunate, isn’t it.

WALTER: What.

MARJORIE: Julia Roberts, forever etched upon our lives. (Beat) What if we saw Casablanca instead? Let’s say we saw Casablanca in an old theater with velvet seats, and then, on the way home, you proposed. Then, by the next time we talk, it will be true.

WALTER: You mean make it up?

MARJORIE (Narrowing her eyes): You...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Production History
• Characters
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Thoughts on the Primes
• About the Author