Richard Lawson

Kail tries many things to make this mess of performance feel like a dynamic piece of art. Actors (rather needlessly) rearrange sets between scenes, overlong transitions that are scored by original compositions from Nicholas Britell (who, among other things, wrote the theme to Succession). There are some trust falls, a fog machine is frequently employed (as fog is a heavy motif in O’Neill’s text), a great metal beam spins ominously over the proceedings. But it’s all adornment of a sinking ship, a production that seems to have no concrete or compelling stance on what forces have sent these people crashing into one another.

Harrison, in his poetic but sometimes cliched language, suggests it is a little bit of both. Our time on Earth is terribly fleeting, and isn’t that sad? But also some part of us does linger on in those who knew us, those who tell our stories, who reach fondly for us in moments of nostalgia. If tech can somehow aid in that, perhaps we should let it. Marjorie Prime is frustratingly ambivalent about that idea, tossing it around and wanly entertaining both sides of the argument before it ventures off into what perhaps interests Harrison more. With its tech conceit set aside, Marjorie Prime is mostly a story of trauma echoing through generations of a family, which is a quite common theme within the American theater canon.

There’s a strange, undermining, conflicted nature to Mayer’s project, a push and pull between eras and customs. Perhaps that is actually the great insight of this Chess. Not about the Able Archer 83 incident that almost ended the world, nor about the whirring mechanics of mind and heart that govern chess phenoms. (Truly, the actual game barely factors in here, save for two inventively staged sequences that imagine the interior monologues of players during a match.) Rather, this Chess teaches us a history lesson about the world pre-meta-irony and the one post-, in which we find ourselves mired at the moment.