Where do our memories go when we die? Jordan Harrison’s “Marjorie Prime,” now receiving its Broadway premiere at the Helen Hayes Theatre, asks this question with stunning simplicity and devastating honesty. In Harrison’s near-future, holographic AI companions called “Primes” serve as repositories for family stories, programmed by the living to remember what we tell them—and only what we tell them. The play premiered at Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum in 2014 and transferred to Playwrights Horizons in 2015, where it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Kauffman, who directed that acclaimed Off-Broadway production, returns here with a staging that refines and deepens her original vision, bringing the work to new levels of emotional clarity and theatrical power. But the real question isn’t about technology at all. It’s about what we choose to share while we’re alive—and the devastating revelation that the living often share more with these digital ghosts than they ever shared with each other.

The most shattering insight in this production arrives gradually, accumulating across Harrison’s three-part structure until its weight becomes unbearable. Jon (Danny Burstein) tells Walter Prime (Christopher Lowell)—a holographic recreation of his deceased father-in-law—about his son Damian’s suicide, sharing details he could never bring himself to say to his wife Tess (Cynthia Nixon). Marjorie (June Squibb) is warmer, more playful, more genuinely herself with her AI husband than she ever managed to be with her actual daughter. The technology designed to preserve human connection exposes how profoundly the family failed at connection in the first place. The Primes become confessor-priests for truths too painful to share with the living, guardians of secrets the family couldn’t speak aloud to each other.

“How much does she have to forget before she’s not your mom anymore?” Jon asks Tess in a moment of quiet devastation. It’s the question that haunts the play’s exploration of identity and loss, made urgent by Marjorie’s advancing dementia. But Harrison’s genius lies in how he threads an even more painful question through the narrative: what happens when we erase the past we can’t bear to remember? When Tess programs Marjorie Prime in Part Two and is asked about other children, she hesitates only briefly before lying: “Just me.” She erases Damian—her brother who killed himself at thirteen, who killed the family dog before taking his own life, who received the maternal attention she craved and resented. The lie registers with terrible clarity. But in Part Three, set in some distant future where only the Primes remain, Walter Prime tells the story Tess tried to delete. The truth resurfaces through the collective memory of the artificial beings, restored not despite human erasure but because of the conversations the Primes have with each other when the humans are gone. It’s cathartic and unsettling in equal measure—our memories survive us, but not necessarily in the forms we tried to control.

Harrison uses the Primes not as science-fiction gimmick but as elegant trope for exploring enduring questions about memory, sharing, and the stories we tell to survive. What memories do we keep and why? What do we share with others and what do we guard fiercely or bury completely? What questions are we too afraid to ask? What truths do we carry to the grave—or try to? The Primes hover over their human counterparts almost like guardian angels, patient witnesses to what gets spoken and what remains stubbornly silent. This isn’t window-dressing or intellectual posturing. Harrison honestly grapples with how we construct ourselves through the stories we tell and retell, how memory is always collaborative even when we think it’s private, how the past we try to forget has a way of insisting on being remembered.

At 96, June Squibb delivers a performance of remarkable depth and nuance. She makes us feel the terror of disappearing—the moment when Marjorie, listening to Vivaldi’s “Winter,” cries out “Walter, I’m scared. This is it, isn’t it—there isn’t anything after”—but also the quotidian indignities of aging. When Marjorie has an accident and must be cleaned up, Squibb’s shame feels utterly natural, the kind any of us would feel in that moment. But what’s most extraordinary is her work as Marjorie Prime in Part Two, where she brings a level of authenticity that’s rare on any stage. The AI version of Marjorie is warmer, more present, more emotionally available than the human ever was—and Squibb makes us understand both why Tess would want to remember her mother this way and what a devastating indictment that desire represents.

Cynthia Nixon faces the play’s most difficult role and meets it with fierce intelligence. Her Tess is a resentful caregiver spiraling into despair, unable to forgive her mother for perceived slights while watching her disappear piece by piece. Nixon makes palpable Tess’s feeling that she never received the maternal attention her brother commanded even in death, her refusal to admit she needs therapy, her inability to be fully transparent with Jon about her own feelings. Tess is the character who most embodies human messiness—the resentment, the inability to forgive, the refusal to seek help, the opacity even with those closest to her. In a play about how we program artificial beings to be more perfect than we are, someone has to embody the difficult, unreachable humanity we’re trying to escape, and Nixon does exactly that.

Danny Burstein serves as the production’s emotional anchor, the one character who never becomes a Prime. There’s profound meaning in this—Jon is the survivor, the one left to make sense of everyone else’s stories, the one who must program Tess Prime after finding his wife hanging from a tree in Madagascar. Burstein’s scene with the newly activated Tess Prime is pivotal and heartbreaking. As he feeds information to this holographic recreation of his dead wife, we discover how much Tess kept to herself while alive, how much she needed others to define her because she couldn’t quite see herself clearly. Burstein plays it with devastating simplicity—a man trying to resurrect his wife by programming an artificial intelligence with memories and observations, only to realize how much about her he never fully understood.

Christopher Lowell’s Walter Prime successfully navigates the play’s trickiest performance challenge: seeming convincingly human while remaining just slightly not-quite-right. He avoids anything robotic, making it easy to forget he’s a hologram until he says something like “I’m afraid I don’t have that information.” But even those moments read less as artificial limitation than as human-like withholding—the way any of us might decline to answer when we don’t want to share.

Anne Kauffman’s staging serves Harrison’s text with elegant restraint. Lee Jellinek’s Palm Springs-modern set executes a simple but breathtaking gesture in the final moments: the three Primes move upstage to the kitchen table, and as bright light and sound build, the table glides slowly downstage nearly to the apron. It’s here that the Primes—alone now, perhaps centuries after their human models have died—share their collective memories in unhurried conversation. The long pauses that mark Part Three initially feel unnatural, but they make perfect sense: these are artificial beings with no need for human-speed responses, having a casual conversation about people they never knew but whose stories they carry forever. This sequence answers one of the play’s most urgent questions: yes, our memories survive us, but in forms we can’t control, told by voices we never heard, edited by time and retelling into something both true and transformed.

The play ends with Marjorie Prime’s simple declaration: “How nice that we could love somebody.” It’s deliberately ambiguous—is she describing the human capacity for love, or has she, as an artificial being, somehow learned to feel it herself? Harrison refuses to resolve the question, and Kauffman lets the moment breathe. Vivaldi’s “Winter” plays, those high pizzicato notes like icicles that Marjorie once played in orchestra. The scene earns its emotional weight because the entire production has earned our trust in its emotional honesty.

This production isn’t studied or overly controlled—it’s achingly real. Harrison has written a play that asks enduring questions about memory, loss, and love with genuine philosophical rigor, and Kauffman has staged it with the kind of restraint that actually amplifies rather than mutes its emotional impact. The performances resist sentimentality while embracing genuine emotion, and the design elements serve the story without calling attention to themselves.

“Marjorie Prime” ranks among the finest productions of the season. It’s a must-see not because it offers easy answers or comforting resolutions, but because it asks the questions we most need to ask about how we remember, what we share, and what survives when we’re gone. In a theatrical landscape increasingly dominated by spectacle and nostalgia, Harrison’s play and Kauffman’s production offer something rarer: a genuine meditation on what it means to be human in a world where our memories—and perhaps soon our consciousness itself—can be programmed, preserved, and passed on to digital beings who will outlive us all.