SLIPPERINESS OF MEMORY
Coulter starring in Marjorie Prime
It may be set in the future, but Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime couldn’t be more timely, not least given the recent announcement of a multimilliondollar boost to an Ontario-based (and Quebec-involved) “artificial intelligence supercluster” of companies.
It’s not too fanciful to imagine one of the things up for research in Ontario will be the possibility of using memory-implanted AI entities to provide companionship and therapy for dementia sufferers. That’s the intriguing and subtly-handled premise in Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play (which was recently adapted into a movie starring Louis Smith and John Hamm).
In Lisa Rubin’s Segal production, which opens Sunday, one of Canada’s most venerated actresses, Clare Coulter, plays Marjorie, an 85-year-old ex-violinist whose family members struggle over the ethics of inviting a “Prime,” a 100 per cent lifelike hologram of her late husband, into her home.
“To my mind, it’s not just about the future,” says Coulter in a phone conversation with the Montreal Gazette.
She goes on to trace the technology in the play back to the age of the photograph, “a mechanical representation that gives you enormous emotional involvement in an image that’s not the real person.”
In fact, for all its sci-fi trappings and Blade Runner-like musings about microchip memories, Marjorie Prime is exploring age-old questions about the slipperiness of memory plumbed by such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Michel Tremblay, whose Albertine in Five Times would make an ideal companion piece to Marjorie Prime. (Coulter appeared in its English première at the National Arts Centre in 1984.)
“I think what’s fascinating about Marjorie Prime is (the way it shows) a person responding emotionally to bits of information about her life which don’t always come out as the truth,” Coulter says. “And then the question is: Does it matter whether something is true or not if it supplies the emotional truth we’re looking for?”
As well as figuring out how to convey the truth or otherwise of memories, some of the acting choices during the rehearsal process have focused on such practicalities as whether the pixelated Primes can engage in physical contact? Can they pick things up? Inevitably, though, Coulter and her fellow cast members Ellen David, Tyrone Benskin and Eloi Archambaudoin have been propelled into the realm of philosophical inquiry.
“For me, and this is just my particular view, the thing that separates human from machine is that, even though machines can describe feelings in language, they’re not mortal,” Coulter says. “All the complicated relationships we humans have with each other — the sarcasm, the meanness — have to do with our sense of mortality. The Primes are without the anxiety that comes with mortality, and that’s why they’re constantly feeling good about things, and even turning bad things into something good.”
They can “do” sad, Coulter observes, “but they don’t really have much understanding of the sadness.”
But couldn’t they be programmed with the emotional downer that comes with mortality?
“I guess that’s where I need
Does it matter whether something is true or not if it supplies the emotional truth we’re looking for?
to do some further thinking on that,” Coulter says. “I know there’s an optimism to them and maybe in the play they’re programmed to be upbeat. But I suppose you could program Primes to be absolutely tragic if you wanted to lead the subject into absolute despair.”
That, of course, would be an ideal setup for an episode of the brutally dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror rather than the more gently hopeful world of Harrison’s play, although Coulter insists that “he’s not breaking open a bottle of champagne and saying ‘Aren’t we all going forward wonderfully?’ ”
I wouldn’t be the first to notice that the process of priming the Primes for their roles has similarities to the process of being an actor.
“Isn’t that amazing ? It’s true,” Coulter marvels, going on to talk about how actors are “programmed” to “have absolute commitment and identification, so that we suffer with the character. And yet we know in our mind that it is not us. Leaving the character behind in the theatre and going home to something that gives you some respite from that, that’s a trick. You have to do it, or you’ll be haunted and be pursued until you go mad.”
Nowhere is that more true, one imagines, than in the playing of Shakespeare’s most monumentally traumatized character, King Lear, as Coulter famously did to great acclaim between 2011 and 2014 at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre.
Which brings us to the limited availability of meaty roles for women of a certain age as compared with those available to men.
“There’s a great movement in the Stratford Festival which is saying women should be able to play roles written for men,” Coulter says. As for Lear, “one thing I didn’t want to examine was that of masculinity. I was more interested in playing a family disaster.”
One hopes that whatever the future holds technologically, we might also see a brave new world in which more Lear-sized roles are written for actresses of the stature and experience of Coulter. Marjorie Prime looks like it is a step in the right direction.
Marjorie Prime plays from Feb. 25 to March 18 at Segal Centre, 5170 Côte- Ste-Catherine Rd. Tickets $61, seniors $55, students $24.50. Call 514-739-7944 or visit segalcentre.org
Philosophical musings on AI and emotion also abound in Les robots font-ils l’amour, which plays from Feb. 27 to March 10 at Usine-C (1345 Lalonde Ave.). It’s a playful Brechtian discourse created by Angela Konrad, the director behind wonderful deconstructions a couple of years back of Macbeth at this theatre and of Richard III at Théâtre de Quat’Sous.
Speaking of Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, which he co-wrote with Elizabeth Hauptmann, is being performed by the graduating students of the National Theatre School at Monument-National (1182 St. Laurent Blvd.) from Feb. 27 to March 3. Directed by Centaur Theatre boss Eda Holmes, it has an onstage orchestra to deliver the rough magic of Kurt Weill’s songs (Mack the Knife, The Cannon Song, etc).
Finally, there’s the annual feast of circus skills known as Coups de Coeur playing to March 4 at TOHU (2345 Jarry St. E), featuring the crème de la crème of contemporary circus artists from home and abroad.