Review: THE ANTIQUITIES Looks Back from the Future at SpeakEasy Stage

As philosopher George Satayana put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Playwright Jordan Harrison’s 2025 drama “The Antiquities” – being given a fine New England premiere at SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through March 28 – uses history to explore where things went wrong.

Harrison, whose Pulitzer Prize-finalist play “Marjorie Prime” was presented at Central Square Theater in 2016 starring the late and much-missed Sarah deLima, and this year on Broadway with June Squibb, has written another substantive play. This one is set as a tour of the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, with 12 exhibits, beginning with Mary Shelley’s conceiving of a male figure created in a scientist’s lab in 1816’s “Frankenstein” and concluding centuries later in 2240 after humanity has ceased to exist on Earth.

In one compelling act, the play follows a fascinating path from the earliest advent of artificial life and AI to their ultimate consumption of human life. A uniformly excellent cast – Harry Baker, Catia, Kelsey Fonise, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Alison Russo, Anderson Stinson III, Helen Hy-Yuen Swanson, and Tobias Wilson – share a wide range of roles as mannequins who come to life in vignettes that play out in cleverly boxed areas of the set.

The direction by Alex Lonati (“The Cost of Living”) is often sluggish, perhaps because the many scene changes are done robotically, slowing the pacing. It’s a puzzlement, too, that the AI of the future has become so adept at imitating real humans – doing much in each scene to draw in the audience – and yet, when appearing as itself, still speaks and moves in the ways that have traditionally signaled “robot.” The museum greeters are played, with winning charm by Kelsey Fonise and Alison Russo, as two 18th-century characters who could be audio-animatronic displays in Walt Disney’s Hall of Presidents.

However, the considerable poignancy in Harrison’s writing carries the day. Checking in on humans interacting with several forms of technology, from people reacting to family members with medical prosthetics to actors worried about being replaced by AI performers, Harrison gives his characters appealing warmth and wit as they face a wide range of human concerns, at different stages of time, from parenting to homosexuality and differences in ambition.

Christopher and Justin Swader’s carved wooden arch frames each scene, like an overarching museum setting. And props to props coordinator Julie Wonkka for sourcing period-appropriate set pieces, which fit well with costume designer Lila B. West’s era-capturing clothing. Amanda E. Fallon’s excellent lighting demarcating the scenes and the sound design by Anna Drummond – which brings back the past and portends the future – complete the production.

If you’re a certain age, you’ll instantly recognize the scratchy sound of modems connecting in the early 1990s, in a warm and funny scene featuring Wilson, Baker, and Fonise. In another, more emotional, playlet set in 1987, a woman can’t sleep after losing her brother to AIDS, so she joins her also grieving and equally restless son to watch her soaps which she recorded on Betamax videotape – transformative technology four decades ago, with a shorter lifespan than initially imagined.

As Harrison points out, it wasn’t only the robots that killed us, but also abandonment of empathy and gradual detachment from each other. While earlier technologies like home computers and VCRs often brought people together, more recently, life-changing technology has become something that more often separates us, making it feel more life-invading and poised to take over. “The Antiquities” may not add much to worries that it will, but it depicts them well.