{"id":21562,"date":"2025-02-05T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-02-05T02:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21562"},"modified":"2025-02-05T02:28:39","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T02:28:39","slug":"the-antiquities-review-relics-of-late-human-life-in-12-exhibits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21562","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Antiquities\u2019 Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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According to Jordan Harrison\u2019s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.<\/p>\n

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By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response \u2014 \u201cyou\u2019re demented\u201d \u2014 quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.<\/p>\n

\u201cMay we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just \u201ca transitional species\u201d and \u201ca blip on the timeline\u201d?<\/p>\n

That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison\u2019s play \u201cThe Antiquities,\u201d<\/a> which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley\u2019s monster (which she counterfactually calls a \u201ccomputer\u201d) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to \u201cexhibits\u201d in what the play\u2019s alternative title calls \u201cA Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.\u201d The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein\u2019s monster, destroyed it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, March\u00e1nt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg\u2019s set made up of matte metal panels.<\/span>Richard Termine for The New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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At first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or \u2014 to us, smack in the middle of the timeline \u2014 hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.<\/p>\n

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According to Jordan Harrison\u2019s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response \u2014 \u201cyou\u2019re demented\u201d \u2014 quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.\u201cMay we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,\u201d he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just \u201ca transitional species\u201d and \u201ca blip on the timeline\u201d?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison\u2019s play \u201cThe Antiquities,\u201d which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley\u2019s monster (which she counterfactually calls a \u201ccomputer\u201d) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to \u201cexhibits\u201d in what the play\u2019s alternative title calls \u201cA Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.\u201d The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein\u2019s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, March\u00e1nt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg\u2019s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or \u2014 to us, smack in the middle of the timeline \u2014 hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21564,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21565,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21562\/revisions\/21565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}