WE WON’T KNOW WHAT
WE’VE GOT ‘TIL IT’S GONE

An exploration of what it means to be human
through the consciousness of the machines we created

Kelsey Fonise, Anderson Stinson III

SpeakEasy Stage presents the New England premier of Jordan Harrison’s The Antiquities in a groundbreaking, thought-provoking, and poignant production directed by Alex Lonati. Nine actors take on more than 40 roles in a series of vignettes spanning 1816 to 2240 and back again to explore a range of human experiences in relation to increasingly intelligent machines.

Presented as an exhibit at the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, the exhibits attempt to explain human life from the perspective of artificial intelligence, creatures capable of appearing human but who struggle to comprehend what it might mean to be mortal—or finite.

Alison Russo, John Kuntz, Kelsey Fonise, Tobias Wilson

The play begins with Russo and Fonise, as non-human curators, welcoming the audience to the museum. From there we move to 1816, and that famed gathering in which Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Lord Byron, along with Byron’s pregnant lover Claire Clairmont and his physician Dr. Briggs, sit around a fire, challenging one another to tell ghost stories. Mary announces that she has a tale to tell, but before she can tell it, the scene shifts.

It’s 1910, and a factory worker is examining a finger she lost to a machine.

From there we continue through the 20th century and into the 21st century and beyond, to see humans fascinated by robots and their first experiences with the internet, grappling with death and mortality, and eventually attempting to escape the domination of machines. And then the play spools back, reversing direction to visit each “exhibit” a second time, now with a fresh perspective on the ways that humans interact with intelligent machines. Now these scenes have a new poignancy, because we see the culmination of the robots and smart phones and internet that humans initially greeted with such delight.

Helen Hy-Yuen Swanson and Harry Baker

Now when we return to 1816, Mary Shelley tells the tale she introduced at the beginning of the play. It’s the story of Victor Frankenstein, who experiments with electricity and corpses to make a monster.

But Harrison offers a new twist on that familiar story. In this version, the monster names itself.

The name it chooses is Computer, and now we understand why there is a museum of “late human antiquities.”

Tobias Wilson, Harry Baker, Kelsey Fonise

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photos by Benjamin Rose Photography

The Antiquities
SpeakEasy Stage Company
Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street
1 hour 45 minutes with no intermission
ends on March 28, 2026
for tickets, visit SpeakEasyStage

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BIO: Lynne Weiss is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association. Her work has also appeared in Literary Ladies Guide and in The Common, Black Warrior Review, and the Ploughshares Blog. She has an MFA from UMass Amherst and has received residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A lifelong social justice activist, she is at work on a novel set in 1930s Cornwall. Her reviews, travel tales, and progressively optimistic opinions are on her substack.