With the Oct. 21 opening of “Marjorie Prime,” the past and the future converge at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. Jordan Harrison’s provocative drama is set in a future time when you can summon the dead via hologram, and relive your memories with them — not necessarily as they were, but as you would have liked them to be.
The production’s cast and crew, meanwhile, find themselves looking back as they focus on the present show’s futuristic take on memory. “Marjorie Prime” is the last show Writers will stage in the Books on Vernon annex that’s been home to the theater since 1992.
“It’s with very mixed emotions I say farewell to the bookstore,” Writers’ Artistic Director Michael Halberstam says. “We’ve made a lot of magic in that room over the past two and a half decades and it will always hold a place in my heart. But the theater is finally past its prime — pun mostly intended.”
It’s been 100 productions and 113 Joseph Jefferson nominations since Writers debuted in 1992. The bookstore era ends on Feb. 28, with the closing of “Marjorie Prime.” In its place, the state-of-the-art multi-million dollar space Writers Theatre plans to open this spring. The venue will have two theaters — a larger space comparable to the Tudor Court theater Writers’ opened in 2003 and a tiny black box in keeping with the bookstore’s storied aesthetic.
Actor Kate Fry marks her fifth show at Writers with “Marjorie Prime,” where her previous credits include last year’s “Hedda Gabbler” and 2009’s “A Minister’s Wife.” In “Marjorie Prime” Fry plays the daughter of a widower (Mary Ann Thebus). Primes, Fry explains, are holograms of deceased loved ones. In the play’s futuristic world, you can buy a prime, and by talking to it, fill it with memories.
“Doing this show is totally bittersweet,” Fry says. “It would be more difficult if I didn’t feel like the intimate aesthetic of the bookstore wasn’t being completely preserved in the new theater. But it is. One of the things that’s so cool about the new space is that instead of this multi-million dollar arena like thing, there’s going to be two spaces that preserve the intimacy that Writers has always had. Although there are some changes — I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about having a bathroom for the actors. And dressing rooms.”
At Books on Vernon, the “dressing room” is a curtain draped across the back end of the children’s section and directly in the path of any anybody entering or exiting the theater.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard audience members talking about whether they liked the show or my performance or whatever as they walk by that curtain,” says Fry. “It’s great when they like you, you develop a thick skin for when they don’t.”
Director Kimberly Senior said “Marjorie Prime” is a perfect ending play for the bookstore.
“It’s a play about the future, but it draws deeply from the past and from memory. It’s a play that deals with grief and death — which is what leaving the bookstore is, a kind of little death,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong — I’m thrilled about the new place. It’s amazing. But there’s a sadness to the end of an era.”
‘Marjorie Prime’
Oct. 21–Feb. 28
Writers Theatre Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Ave., Glencoe
847-242-6000; www.writerstheatre.org