It’s 2062, the age of artificial intelligence, and 85-year-old Marjorie — a jumble of disparate, fading memories — has a handsome new companion who’s programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance? In this richly spare, wondrous new play, Jordan Harrison explores the mysteries of human identity and the limits — if any — of what technology can replace.

Jordan Harrison was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. Harrison is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the Roe Green Award from Cleveland Play House, the Heideman Award, a Theater Masters Innovative Playwright Award, the Loewe Award for Musical Theater, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships, a NYSCA grant, and an NEA/TCG Residency with The Empty Space Theater.

MTC provides advisories for each production regarding special effects—when applicable—that may affect patron health and physical sensitivities. MTC does not provide advisories relating to content, because content sensitivities vary from patron to patron. If you have questions about content, please contact the box office prior to purchasing your tickets as we do not offer refunds to patrons who choose not to see a show based on subject matter. 

Performance Schedule

Evenings

Tue - Sun 7:30pm

Matinees 

Sun (Preview) May 6, 4pm
Thu (Perspectives) May 17, 1pm
Sat, May 12 & 26, 2pm
Sun May 13, 20 & 27, 2pm

Ticket Prices

Performance Center
seating
Side
seating
Previews (May 3-6) $37 $37
Opening Night (May 8) $60 $55
Sat Eve $60 $55
Tue*, Wed, Thu, Fri & Sun Eve $49 $44
Matinees $49 $44
Best Deal (all shows, limited availability) n/a $25

* Excludes Opening Night.

Prices subject to change. 

Phone orders subject to a $10 per order fee; online orders subject to a $3 per order fee

Disabled seating is currently only available through the MTC Box Office (415.388.5208 or in person). We apologize for any inconvenience.

Discounts

  • GROUPS – Bring eight or more people to receive a $7 discount on tickets. Call to book with the discount (415) 388-5208
  • SENIORS (65+) – $4 off any performances 
  • UNDER 30 – $22, all performances
  • TEENS – $10, all performances
  • MILITARY – $6 off all performances. MTC is a proud member of the Blue Star Theatres program. Click here to learn more, and call to book with the discount (415) 388-5208
  • EDUCATOR – $12, all performances (limit 2). Must teach at a Marin County School. Contact the Education Dept. to request. 

Military and Under 30 discounts and special group rates available only by calling or visiting the Box Office in person: (415) 388-5208.

Promo Codes distributed for online redemption subject to availability.  Only ONE (1) Promo Code will be valid per order.  Promo Codes do not apply to Best Deal ($25) tickets.

Select a Performance

To begin your ticket purchase, select a performance from the calendar below:

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Cast

  • ​Joy Carlin*

    ​Joy Carlin*

    Marjorie

    Joy Carlin is pleased to work again at MTC where she appeared in Misalliance, My Old Lady, and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. An actress and director for many years, 25 of them as a member of the company at A.C.T., where she was also an Associate Artistic Director. She was Interim Artistic Director at the Berkeley Rep where she also acted and directed. She also acts or directs at Aurora Theatre Co., San Francisco Playhouse, Theatre First, Jewel Theatre in Santa Cruz, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Theatreworks in Palo Alto. She has been seen in television and films, most recently in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

    + Show more
  • Julie Eccles*

    Julie Eccles*

    Tess

    Julie Eccles has performed with Marin Theatre Company in Mere Mortals. Most recently she was seen as Emilia in Othello at the California Shakespeare Theatre. Other plays at Cal Shakes include Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Candida, The Importance of Being Earnest, Pastures of Heaven, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear and An Ideal Husband. She has also performed locally with A.C.T., Berkeley Rep., TheatreWorks, San Jose Rep., Aurora Theatre Co., San Francisco Shakespeare Festival and Word For Word. Other Regional theatres include Huntington Theatre, Seattle Rep., Geva Theatre and Syracuse Stage. Television and film credits include: Poor Little Rich Girl, Once In A Lifetime, Strange Interlude and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Julie attended the University of California, Davis and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

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  • ​Anthony Fusco*

    ​Anthony Fusco*

    Jon

    Anthony Fusco was last seen at MTC in My Old Lady (also with Joy Carlin) Mr. Fusco is glad to be back! He has been a Bay Area theatre mainstay since coming here from New York in 1999. For A.C.T., where he is a Resident Artist, Fusco has appeared in nearly 50 productions, most recently Hamlet and A Christmas Carol. He’s been in a dozen productions for CalShakes, including You Never Can Tell, Pygmalion, and King Lear. At Berkeley Rep Mr. Fusco appeared in The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Communism and Capitalism with a Key to the Scriptures, and Vanya & Sonia & Masha & Spike. NYC credits include The Real Thing and The Real Inspector Hound (Broadway), Holy Terror (off-Broadway), and Danton’s Death (off-off-Broadway). He’s done some movies, too, but not so you’d notice. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and children, one of whom is now taller than he is.

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  • Thomas Gorrebeeck*

    Thomas Gorrebeeck*

    Walter

    Thomas Gorrebeeck is thrilled to be back at Marin Theatre Company after appearing in Shakespeare in Love and last season’s Miss Bennet. Regional credits: A Streetcar Named Desire (KC Actors Theatre), How to Steal a Picasso (The Unicorn Theatre). SF Bay Area credits: All My Sons (Jewel Theatre), Colossal (SF Playhouse), The Real Thing, The Monster-Builder, and Eccentricities of a Nightingale (Aurora Theatre Company), A Few Good Men (Hillbarn Theatre), Cymbeline (Marin Shakes), Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion (Livermore Shakes), Sleuth and Dracula (CenterREP), Sense & Sensibility and The Chosen (TheatreWorks), Much Ado About Nothing (Cal Shakes), Hamlet, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, Dead Man Walking, and The Three Musketeers (City Lights Theater Company). Mr. Gorrebeeck received his BA from New York University and is a proud member of AEA & SAG/AFTRA.

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Creative Team

  • ​Jordan Harrison

    ​Jordan Harrison

    Playwright

    Jordan Harrison was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. A film adaptation by Michael Almereyda debuted at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Jordan’s other plays include The Amateurs (Currently playing at The Vineyard Theatre); Maple and Vine (Playwrights Horizons, Humana Festival); The Grown-Up (Humana Festival); Amazon and Their Men (Clubbed Thumb); Doris to Darlene (Playwrights Horizons); Act a Lady (Portland Center Stage); Finn in the Underworld (Berkeley Repertory Theatre); Futura (NAATCO); Kid-Simple (Humana Festival); and a children’s musical, The Flea and the Professor (Arden Theatre). His new play, Log Cabin, will premiere at Playwrights Horizons this spring. Jordan is the recipient of the Horton Foote Prize, Guggenheim and Hodder Fellowships, the Kesselring Prize, the Roe Green Award, the Heideman Award, and a NEA/TCG Residency. A graduate of the Brown MFA program, he is an alumnus of New Dramatists. Jordan has developed TV series for Sundance and TNT, and wrote for three seasons of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black

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  • Ken Rus Schmoll

    Ken Rus Schmoll

    Director

    Ken Rus Schmoll directed the world premieres of Jordan Harrison’s The Grown-Up (Humana Festival) and Amazons and Their Men (Clubbed Thumb). New York credits include Antlia PneumaticaIowa (Playwrights Horizons); JudyGrounded (Page 73); Card and Gift, Luther, Telethon, Demon Baby (Clubbed Thumb); The Invisible Hand, Red Dog Howls (New York Theatre Workshop); Not What Happened (BAM Next Wave); A Map of Virtue, Mark Smith, Aphrodisiac, The Internationalist (13P); FUREE in Pins and Needles, Telephone (Foundry Theatre); Middletown, The Internationalist (Vineyard Theatre); and What Once We Felt (LCT3). Regional credits include The Bridge of San Luis ReyThe Women of PadillaSeven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England (Two River Theater); John (ACT); Love in the Wars (Bard SummerScape); Death Tax (Humana Festival); It Happens Like This (Tanglewood); and Proserpina (Spoleto Festival USA). He is the recipient of two Obie Awards, a Lucille Lortel Award nomination, and a Drama League Award nomination. Next up: Gone Missing (Encores! Off-Center).

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  • Kimie Nishikawa

    Kimie Nishikawa

    Set Designer

    Kimie Nishikawa is a Brooklyn based scenic designer from Tokyo, Japan. Recent credits include: Ain't No Mo' (The Public) Masculinity Max (The Public); Hello, From the Children of Planet Earth (Playwrights Realm); Sagittarius Ponderosa (NAATCO / 3LD); The Comedy of Errors (Classic Stage Company). She has collaborated internationally as associate scenic designer on the world premiere of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (NYUAD Arts Center /Abu Dhabi), and Into The Woods (Tivoli Glassalen / Denmark). MFA: NYU Tisch. www.kimienishikawa-design.com

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  • Michael Palumbo

    Lighting Designer

    Michael Palumbo returns to Marin Theatre Company where he has designed My Children! My Africa!It’s a Wonderful LifeboomGod of CarnageFuddy MeersKiller Joe, and the premieres of Sunlightand 9 Circles. He has created designs for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Opera San Jose, Magic Theatre, Sacramento Opera, Aurora Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theatre, SF Playhouse, Bay Area Musicals, and Teatro Vision. He is an Associate Artist at San Jose Stage Company where he designed scenery & lighting for Sweeney ToddHand to God,Fool for LoveThe Toxic AvengerThe Wild Party, and the premiere of Donal O’Kelly’s The Memory Stick; and lighting for the premieres of Valley of the Heartby Luis Valdez and The Postman Always Rings Twice adapted by Jon Jory. MFA: NYU Tisch. Web: michaelpalumbodesign.com

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  • Jessie Amoroso

    Jessie Amoroso

    Costume Designer

    Jessie Amoroso is happy to be working with Ken Rus Schmoll again, their last collaboration was John by Annie Baker at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater.  Other A.C.T. costume design credits include Testament, Ah, Wilderness, Love and Information, Underneath the Lintel, Chester Bailey, and Vietgone. Bay area theater design and styling credits include work at California Theatre Center, New Conservatory Theatre Center, Julia Morgan Theatre, Solano College Theater, Berkeley City Club Theater, Marines Memorial Theatre, Herbst Theatre, Herbst Pavilion, and The Palace of Fine Arts. Other highlights include designing two world premieres for Brad Erickson at NCTC the most recent being American Dream. At Theater Artaud/Z Space he designed Caligula featuring Nancy Carlin and A Round-Heeled Woman starring Sharon Gless. Jessie is a graduate of California State University Hayward (Now CSU East Bay) and a member of USA829.

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  • Brendan Aanes

    Sound Designer

    Recent productions include The Unfortunates, JohnThe Hard Problem and Chester Bailey at American Conservatory Theater, The Curious Incident Of The Dog in the Night-Time and Fire In Dreamland at Kansas City Rep, Balls and {my lingerie play} Off-Broadway, The Glass Menagerie and Othello at California Shakespeare Theater, Cowboy Bob at Ars Nova (NYC), Triangle, Life Of The Party, The Confederates, and The Lake Effect for TheatreWorks, The Way West at Marin Theatre Company, and The Hundred Flowers Project at Crowded Fire Theater. 

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  • Kevin Johnson*

    Stage Manager

    Kevin returns to MTC where he last stage managed the special performance of Lady of Largest Heart with Olympia Dukakis. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, he has stage-managed for Aurora Theatre Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, California Shakespeare Theater, Santa Cruz Shakespeare, and many others. He also has stage-managed music and dance productions, including Oakland Symphony, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, San Francisco Jazz Festival (with Bobby McFerrin), International Russian Music Festival, and Dave Brubeck's final album of his choral music, Brubeck and American Poets.

    + Show more
  • Laura Brueckner

    Laura Brueckner

    Production Dramaturg

    Laura Brueckner has been supporting productions and playwrights with her dramaturgical work for over 20 years, with an emphasis on digital dramaturgy, world premieres, and commissions. During this time, she has been proud to count among her collaborators stellar artists such as MTC Playwright in Residence Lauren Gunderson, Christopher Chen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Mina Morita, Marissa Wolf, Idris Goodwin, Lachlan Philpott, and Dominique Serrand, as well as groundbreaking companies Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Crowded Fire Theater, The New Harmony Project, Playwrights Foundation, and, now, Marin Theatre Company. As an artist, she is committed to theatre as a path of social action, critical inquiry, discovery, and delight. Her journalistic writing on artistic process and audience engagement has been published by HowlRound and Theatre Bay Area; her dramaturgical writing has been published by Berkeley Rep, California Shakespeare Theater, and Crowded Fire. A current member of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, she holds a B.A. in English dramatic literature (magna cum laude) from U.C. Berkeley and a Ph.D. in dramaturgy from U.C. San Diego.

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  • Dori Jacob

    Dori Jacob

    Casting Director

    Dori Jacob joined Marin Theatre Company as the casting director in May 2015. For the previous four seasons, she served as the director of new play development for Magic Theatre in San Francisco, and dramaturged its world premieres of Octavio Solis’ Se Llama Cristina, Linda McLean’s Every Five Minutes, Christina Anderson’s PEN/MAN/SHIP, and John Kolvenbach’s Sister Play. As resident producer for Magic Theatre’s developmental programming, Ms. Jacob’s credits include 2011-2015 Virgin Play Series, the 2012 Asian Explosion Reading Series, and the 2013 Costume Shop Festival. Further Bay Area dramaturgy/producing/casting credits include: Assassins at Shotgun Players, Marilee Talkington’s The Creative Process at SOMArts, Laura Schellhardt’s The Comparables, and Elizabeth Hersh’s Shelter in Place at Playwrights Foundation. Ms. Jacob previously served on the executive board and literary committee for the National New Play Network, is a current member of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, and is a graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz and N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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  • Alessandro McLaughlin

    Alessandro McLaughlin

    Assistant Director

    Alessandro McLaughlin is ecstatic about his second show at MTC! Currently an Artistic Direction Intern, Alessandro hails from Andover, Massachusetts and attended Clemson University in South Carolina where he received a BA in Performing Arts with a concentration in Theatre and an emphasis in Directing. At Clemson he performed in several plays, ran a student theatre company, directed two shows (Cock and Closer), and assistant directed many professional productions at the Warehouse Theatre. He would like to thank his family for their support all the way from the East Coast, Ken for the opportunity, and Trevor for his loving heart and many hugs.

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* Denotes member of Actors Equity Association
+ Member, United Scenic Artists
^ Member, Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers

Reviews

  • New frontiers of grief, love in Marin Theatre Company’s ‘Marjorie Prime’

    Instead of a back-handed compliment, call it back-handed criticism: You’ll want more of "Marjorie Prime.”

    Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, whose Bay Area premiere opened Tuesday, May 8, at Marin Theatre Company, has moments of wrenching poignancy. It imagines a 2062 when artificial intelligence can create digital avatars of our dead family members. That advancement helps the aging Marjorie (Joy Carlin), who can talk to a re-creation of her dead husband Walter (Tommy Gorrebeeck) to help jump start a wobbly memory. The reanimation of lost loved ones might also comfort those in long-term mourning, like Tess (Julie Eccles), Marjorie’s high-strung daughter, and Tess’ accommodating husband Jon (Anthony Fusco).

    The technology can’t perfectly recreate humans, though, especially not on its own. To help you, it first requires you to tell it about the person it’s supposed to emulate’ and in those scenes, the play charts new frontiers in human love and human sadness. To watch Fusco’s Jon hesitate as he unfolds the piece of paper that lists the characteristics he wants an avatar to embody is to absorb, for just a moment, grief’s eternal triumph over everything we might devise to stave it off. Science can’t repopulate the solitude of sorrow. The list Jon reads, tremblingly, is both eulogy and greeting, even a kind of birth, but it’s inadequate to all its tasks. Each instruction he gives the avatar — “People think you’re quiet, but you’re not” — feels both too small and too big to begin to give a sense of a person.

    Harrison’s aim, though, isn’t to distill the essence of one person or even one relationship but to map out the reverberations of loss through time — how the scar of one death, years ago, gets imprinted on successive generations, who then mutate and multiply historical trauma with their own fresh ones. But this is the stuff of epic, not of a sleek 80 minutes. Each time Harrison changes focus to a new family member, it’s without giving full due to what came before. The story is hefty enough to merit the nothing-if-not-thorough telling that our American classicists, like Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller, might have given it, rather than that mode now in vogue, where writers nick at then ricochet off the meat of a thing, rather than dig in and chew.

    Still, it’s not so bad to be left wanting more, and Ken Rus Schmoll’s direction affords plenty of delights. Chief among them are Carlin’s expressive powers. All mischief and lopsided smiles as Marjorie, she reminds you how many different things cheeks and eyes and brows can do. She merely looks at someone, and you feel a whole story has transpired, complete with beginning, middle and end.

    The future in set designer Kimie Nishikawa’s envisioning isn’t heavy on pixels and metallic curves, as in the Apple store-inflected mise-en-scene of so many sci-fi movies, but spare to the point of bleakness. A living room of unvarnished wood, as if the whole thing were made out of Ikea furniture, stands in front of an empty sky, colored in Michael Palumbo’s lighting design to look at times like an Ed Ruscha painting. Darkness impinges on a pastel horizon, as night relentlessly encroaches upon day. And the only thing standing in its way, the only thing between you and the march of time, is Gorrebeeck’s avatar. Marjorie can forget for a moment that he’s a robot; he says some of the right things but not all of them, with kindly but vacant eyes. It’s just the same to him to try to remember as to not speak at all. He smiles, but only to serve, not to enjoy. Both delight and its opposite, the play cannily points out, are up to us.

    — Lily Janiak, The San Francisco Chronicle Read full review
  • Sci-fi drama at Marin Theatre Company brings memory to eerie life

    Memory is unreliable at the best of times. No sooner do we have an experience than we start to edit it mentally and different people’s versions of what happened start to diverge. The stories we tell about our past become self-perpetuating, refined in the retelling to take on a life on their own as a kind of personal mythology.

    Playwright Jordan Harrison plays off that phenomenon fascinatingly in “Marjorie Prime,” his play making its Bay Area premiere at Marin Theatre Company. (There’s another production playing at Capital Stage in Sacramento.) A 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist, the play was also made into a feature film released last year. The Brooklyn-based playwright and Stanford grad’s work has previously played both American Conservatory Theater (“Maple and Vine,” in 2012) and Berkeley Repertory Theatre (“Finn in the Underworld,” in 2005).

    Played with dotty charm by Joy Carlin, Marjorie is a woman in her 80s whose memory has begun to fail her. When she’s alone she has conversations with a computer program called a “Prime” in the image of her late husband, Walter, at age 30. This Walter Prime is designed to share her own memories with her, always learning through conversation how to be a better Walter and more details of Marjorie’s life to feed back to her. Tommy Gorrebeeck is placid as this virtual Walter, at times playful and even flirtatious, and always earnestly trying to understand so as better to help.

    But Walter only knows what he’s been told, by Marjorie and by others, a version of events that’s been revised, romanticized and sanitized both by the attrition of time and by traumatic truths that are easier left unremembered. He’s the almost lifelike embodiment of the selectiveness of memory.

    Kimie Nishikawa’s set depicts a spacious and spartan living room of unfinished wood that you can smell as you walk in. Marjorie sits in an old-fashioned, weathered easy chair while Walter occupies a sleek, ultra-modern and much less comfortable-looking couch.

    Julie Eccles is brimming with frustration as Tess, Marjorie’s daughter, who’s dubious of the Prime technology and resentful that her mother can conveniently forget all the things that made their relationship so difficult. Anthony Fusco is patient and kind as Tess’ amiable husband Jon, making easy banter with Marjorie and trying his best to mollify Tess.

    The play takes place 40-odd years in the future, but aside from the advances in artificial intelligence, it’s not particularly futuristic. What little is visible in terms of personal possessions — a few books, a small radio — are perfectly recognizable, even a little old fashioned. But some of Marjorie’s references (ZZ Top, some Beyonce lyrics, even the phrase “busted”) are completely foreign to her middle-aged son-in-law.

    Exactly what the Primes are is left up to the imagination. They appear onstage simply as people, represented by an actor sitting in a chair. In the world of the play we don’t know whether they show up on a computer screen or as holograms or robots. Those details aren’t discussed and ultimately aren’t that important. When not in use, the Primes just sit or stand still off to the side somewhere while other people talk, always present but inactive. We’re left to wonder about their essential nature, not just as technology but in their quasi-personhood that strives to improve itself.

    In a effectively disquieting staging by New York director Ken Rus Schmoll (who also recently helmed Annie Baker’s “John” for ACT), this smart, 70-minute play moves on from one time to the next so briskly that it’s almost jarring. Just as things are really getting interesting with a character, that person disappears and we’re on to something else. In that sense, the play gives us the tiniest taste of why these surrogate versions of loved ones are created in the first place. People in the play vanish before we’re ready for them to go, with a lot left unresolved, and all we can do is move on, or perhaps wallow in memory and regrets.

    — Sam Hurwitt, Marin IJ Read full review

Learn More

Select a Performance

To begin your ticket purchase, select a performance from the calendar below:

March 2024
Sun Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat
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