MARJORIE PRIME
by Jordan Harrison
(March 1 to 23, 2024)
Director: Maureen Lukie
Producer: Bill Hammond
About the play. . . .
What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance? A speculative tale set in the near future, the play centers on 85-year-old Marjorie. As her personal memories blend and fade, she meets a new companion who helps her reassemble her life’s moments, both big and small. Marjorie Prime considers the extent to which human identity will be aided or replaced by technology.
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? Will we be any less human, once computers know us better than ourselves?
The play was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a film adaptation of it premiered in the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
“An elegant, thoughtful and quietly unsettling drama. Marjorie Prime operates 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
About Jordan Harrison, the playwright. . . .
Harrison’s other plays include Maple and Vine, The Grown-Up, Doris to Darlene, a cautionary valentine, Amazons and their Men, Act A Lady, Finn in the Underworld, Futura, Kid-Simple, The Flea and the Professor, The Museum Play, Suprema, The Amateurs, and Log Cabin.
As well as the applause of audiences, these plays have brought him a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the Barrymore Award, the Roe Green Award from Cleveland Play House, the Heideman Award, a Theater Masters Innovative Playwright Award, the Loewe Award for Musical Theater, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships, a NYSCA grant, a NEA/TCG Residency with The Empty Space Theater.
A graduate of Stanford University and the Brown MFA program, Jordan is an alumnus of New Dramatists. For three seasons, he was a writer and producer for the Netflix original series “Orange is the New Black.”
About Marjorie Prime, Jordan Harrison has said:
“I don’t think people are comfortable with the idea of humans not being around forever, and I like ambiguity onstage, I was interested in the idea that the Primes captured a part of who people were, not just who they really were, but also things they might have lost at some point.
About Maureen Lukie, the director. . . .
Village Players audiences have seen Maureen on stage recently, in Good People (2020) and Dead Accounts (2023). Now she’s returning as director, also a role familiar to our audiences: Doubt: A Parable (2012), Enchanted April (2008), and The Woman in Black (2005 – a play she also set-designed).
Maureen most recent directing credits come from Scarborough Players – Educating Rita in 2022 and Norm Foster’s Halfway There in September, 2023.
Maureen was a mainstay with the now disappeared Amicus Productions, and remains a mainstay with Toronto Irish Players. She won the ACT-CO Best Director Award three times: Sense and Sensibility (Amicus), James Joyce’s The Dead – the Musical (Toronto Irish Players) and The Melville Boys (Amicus). (She also won Best Supporting Actress in Barefoot in the Park at Amicus.)
Here’s how this director and actress explains why she has remained committed to community theatre:
“Community theatre is so open to bringing together people who want to create and entertain. The arts can be a very competitive industry because of the scarcity of funding and the numbers of people trying to make a living; but that barrier doesn’t pertain to community theatre, where your passion and willingness are your currency.”
In honour of our 50th season: to see an archival photo and cast/crew list from the first play Maureen directed for Village Players (Enchanted April), click on the 50th Season logo below….
Village Players 