Key Highlights
- It’s the early twenty-sixties, and so Marjorie is attended by a holographic Prime of her husband, Walter, who tells her stories from her own life.
- Whatever sort of husband he was before his death, this Walter, eternally youthful, has nothing to do but sit ramrod straight, paying perfect attention to his wife, forever. Now Second Stage revives “Marjorie Prime” at the Hayes, on Broadway, with the mischievous ninety-six-year-old June Squibb as a new and more buoyant Marjorie.
- Squibb, our ingénue, has also been here before.
- Her Broadway début was as a replacement in the role of the stripper Electra in the original 1959 production of “Gypsy”—she sang the immortal lyric “If you wanna make it / Twinkle while you shake it.” Squibb has dutifully kept twinkling (and shaking): her late-career renaissance surged in 2014, with an Oscar nomination for her turn as an exasperated wife in “Nebraska”; and, just last year, she starred in the action comedy “Thelma”—and did her own stunts. Here, Cynthia Nixon plays Marjorie’s anxious daughter, Tess, and Danny Burstein plays her sweet son-in-law, Jon.
- (Kauffman returns to direct.) The three of them live in a strangely impersonal house—the uncanny set design is by Lee Jellinek—overtly “futuristic” only in its kitchen cabinets, which open upward, like the gull wings on a DeLorean.
