I have been at the theater every night this week and sometimes twice a day. Here are two of the best of what I’ve seen and how I see it:

STEREOPHONIC: A masterpiece–from concept to execution. It’s what happens when you lock a 70’s rock band and two engineers in a recording studio until they complete an album which could rocket them to stardom. It’s like Fleetwood Mac meeting Sartre with NO EXIT –and all hell and heaven break loose. The 2024 Broadway production earned 13 nominations (most Tony-nominated ever) including Best Play and Direction. It deserves every one of them. David Adjami’s script captures every nuance of the era’s rock n’ roll culture, from drugs and alcohol-fueled competition, jealousy, and romantic entanglements, with rampant narcissism and creative impulses bleeding through porous emotional and psychological boundaries– all to make music! And this airtight ensemble actually makes the music–vocals and instruments– live onstage delivering brilliant original tunes written by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler.

As for the players? To a person, each one is a vivid, wholly recognizable, lived-in personality whose life we care about and whose stake in the outcome is visceral right down to muppet–like engineers Grover and Charlie. They anchor the show and are given their due as is every one of these remarkable and sympathetic characters. Didn’t think I’d last the three hours–but I was utterly enmeshed. MUST SEE– but ONLY until SUNDAY MARCH 15 presented by ATG at the EMERSON COLONIAL! THEATRE!! MUCH too short a run- BRING THIS BACK!

Benjamin Rose Photography

THE ANTIQUITIES: That’s us! Now. The play lets us look back at extinct humanity from the perspective of digital beings who have supplanted us. We are shown a Museum of Late Human Antiquities–curated and narrated by a pair of “post human” beings wearing old-fashioned clothes as they stare out at us, dead-eyed, and start speaking to the audience: they had me at “Look alive.”  Suddenly I’m laughing. Then immediately I’m thinking about what it is to be alive. Our AI docents ask us (who are presumably all “post” human beings) to imagine (can we as post analog beings, imagine?) what it’s like to have a body, to want, to imagine that at some point we began and will end?  They tellus to “Imagine we’re actually here in these seats in this room in the Late Human age.” This opening scene is GENIUS and sets the stage for playwright and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jordan Harrison’s sleek meditation on mortality and technology.

Nine exceptional actors in multiple roles enact scenes from the past and future which appear and disappear within an elegant series of bronze receding boxes. In the first scenario, Mary and Percy Shelley and their milieu have materialized in an empty space. It’s that fateful stormy night where they all wrote scary stories and Mary comes up with FRANKENSTEIN– a creature of disparate parts who rebelled against his maker. The scene suggests an ingenious hall of conceptual mirrors reflecting the relationship between creator and creation envisioned through time, and echoed in our own time as we struggle with the Pandora’s box we’ve opened to the digital world and artificial intelligence.

Several more scenes span various “messy” human experiences involving suffering and death, family and parenting, sex, personhood, technology, the law, and a dilly of a shopping list which includes a grenade launcher and a big pile of poop! It’s funny when these AI types get it wrong. In one scene someone holds a rotary phone up to his ear while lifting the receiver aloft like an antenna. In another scene a doctor uses a clarinet like a medical instrument. We can only imagine how many museums have misunderstood the uses of various mysterious artifacts from the ancient human past.

And beneath the humor, the questions raised are profound. What can we know past the surface of these artifacts? What can AI know? Can it go beyond “knowing” to “experiencing” the “messy” parts between 0 and 1, the binary code which is the spine of the digital world? i.e. Felt life? Pain? Joy? etc. And suddenly I’m struck by the gift of mortality and the gift of this show. Is there is life without death? When existence has flattened out to include forever, what does “living” mean?  If AI cannot die, is it alive? And does that matter? I FEEL it does– but I’m only human. SEE the New England premiere of THE ANTIQUITIES — before we outsmart ourselves and become one. And thank you Jordan Harrison for writing this play. MUST SEE IT at SpeakEasy Stage through March 28!