Kristen Sieh and Thomas Murphy Molony Photo by Hugo Hentoff

The story comprises a fairly rapid-moving series of scenes within the framing device of an an assemblage of exhibits about the past. To view these, a post-human audience has chosen not just to temporarily inhabit human-like bodies, but to bind themselves to time and space. This gives way to a second rough framing device, as the two members of the cast who welcome this audience then retreat into their roles as Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, gathered around that fateful Lake Geneva fire in 1816 to contemplate life, death and creation.

From here, Harrison makes a brief stop in the social upheaval of the early twentieth century from the point of view of women and children who are both fed into and find a modicum of liberation in factory machinery. But most of the scenes converge on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as creation and automation enter into the tug-of-war that interests Harrison most. The action moves steadily forward for a while, then skips back and forth in time, revisiting characters the audience has met, sometimes to provide closure and sometimes not. Along the way, the threads of love, hate, family, loss, sex and death become hopelessly entangled.

It's a concept that sounds polarizing at best. At worst, any synopsis risks unnecessarily alienating a chunk of a would-be audience that might perceive itself as not interested in science fiction or perhaps completely over low-information pop discussions of AI. But the fault there lies in attempts to summarize what really is ninety-five or so minutes that are mind-bending in the best possible way. Harrison's text, even when not on its best footing, is a skillful blend of humor, pathos, and mutually exhausted nods of ennui and cynicism.

As for the production, the set, based on an original design by Paul Steinberg, is impressively versatile. Walls that suggest stainless steel panels form the most stable element. Even as the characters lounge around the Lake Geneva fire, the way these panels do or don't bounce the artificial firelight reminds us that we are viewing people and places and emotions that have been pinned to a board, set within a diorama, and projected on to a screen the audience finds convenient. These walls shift inward and fan out, narrowing the frame or widening it and directing our attention precisely where the curator wants it to land.

Tyler Micoleau's lighting is integral to the effectiveness of that scenic design. Although there are no natural spaces at all, and few that are lifelike in any any meaningful way, Micoleau conjures up humanity through an open refrigerator or the kitschy red band splashed behind a bar from the 1970s by a stained-glass globe advertising Miller High Life. Christopher Darbassie's sound design complements this work, providing both the kinds of sound cues that humans can imagine to signal that a new digital year is appearing above the stage and establishing a relentless, humming undertone that never lets the audience's attention come to rest.

Brenda Abbandandolo's costumes and the wig and hair design by Leah Loukas make equally important contributions. In historical and recent time periods, there is nothing exactly wrong with what characters are wearing or how they present themselves through clothing, hairstyles, and so on, yet there are moments of "not rightness" that serve as effective, unconscious points of sympathetic resonance with things like a character drinking a from a bottle of Pert or a child in 1910 having a violently purple teddy bear made of synthetic materials.

The cast members are uniformly excellent. Kristen Sieh (Woman 1) and Amelia Workman (Woman 2) establish the tight direction and calibre of performances with their unnervingly self-possessed performances as the AI hosts and on-a-dime shifts into the characters of Mary and Claire, respectively.

Similarly, Aria Shahghasemi (Man 1) and Marchánt Davis (Man 2) burst on the scene as Shelley and Byron, respectively, then retreat and emerge into their various roles in such a way that the audience is torn between trying to connect their various characters across timelines and retreating into enjoying each individual performance.

Helen Joo Lee (Woman 3) seems clearly to be having a ball as she skillfully plays realists more than one hundred years apart, as well as a mother so grief stricken that she retreats into stultifying yet protective Asian cultural norms.

Andrew German (Man 3) is almost unrecognizable from role to role, beginning as the fifth wheel at Lake Geneva and wending his way through roles as a tech-confused grandfather in 2008, the lone realist in a late twenty-first-century resistance movement. The same can be said of Layan Elwazani's (Woman 4) performances of characters who may or may not be related, fifty years apart. Ryan Spahn (Man 4) likewise flashes his chops as a timid, gay nerd, before nerds were cool and as an entitled Silicon Valley asshole.

Finally, as the anchoring, terrifying Boy, Thomas Murphy Molony more than holds his own within this talented, invested, well-directed cast.

The Antiquities runs through June 1, 2025, at Goodman Theatre, Owen Theatre, 170 N Dearborn St, Chicago IL. For tickets and information, please visit GoodmanTheatre.org or call 312-443-3800.