‘Marjorie Prime’ with Cynthia Nixon, June Squibb

The central premise of “Marjorie Prime,” now on Broadway starring Cynthia Nixon, June Squibb, Danny Burstein and Christopher Lowell, is that technology could enable the creation of custom-made robots that would allow, say, a grieving widow with dementia to speak to something that looked and spoke exactly like her late husband. Not only would it be restored to him in three dimensions, but he could also be tanned, handsome, and hot, just like he was in his prime.

The play begins with an elderly woman, played by Squibb, having such a conversation with a strong-jawed guy (Lowell).

I saw this Jordan Harrison for the first time in 2015 in Chicago. The premise was certainly intriguing, but it seemed futuristic and, well, safely distant. At the time, my reaction was mostly one of curiosity, delivered by a joke: “It’s better to interact with strangers in a retirement home, isn’t it?”

NOW? The room is much more eerie, simply because of the passage of time. In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing a play whose impact was so completely different a decade later.

These things are almost here now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and other forms of human mapping that use our history and actions to such an extent that they could reproduce us after death. Once you have those guts, the rest is just sculpted plastic.

So Harrison’s 80-minute play, directed by Anne Kauffman with a look at what matters most, has a new urgency that makes your head turn in all sorts of directions. As you watch, you’ll probably first think about how dementia care—hell, all kinds of elderly care—could be dramatically improved by these robots that can work around the clock. But after a while, as Harrison leads you by the hand this way, your head turns to the issues: Who would win the fight to program these things?

Imagine, for example, two warring siblings with different opinions about their father. His “Prime” version might reflect just one of their dubious views of his identity, leading his widow down the kind of garden path that strikes me as dangerous for the entire human race. Going further, the play explores the likelihood that we may not even be able to control representations of ourselves after we die. For some, this is already the case, God help us.

Harrison explores this problem with a simple four-character play that begins with the aforementioned conversation but then focuses on Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law, played by Nixon and Burstein, friendly people in their fifties who are trying to figure out what they think about this technology and, just as importantly, what it might mean for them in their own futures (I won’t tell, but the play, like the world, only moves forward).

Kauffman is one of America’s most humanistic directors, and Nixon and Burstein craft sympathetic characters, focusing on the vulnerability those of us near 60 feel when it comes to the death and loss of our parents. I should note that I walked into the Hayes Theater at Second Stage after spending a lot of time with my 102-year-old mother, so it was definitely on my mind, even though she wasn’t talking to any robots. Again. However, she speaks to the caregivers, and they have only limited and quickly saturated knowledge of her rich life. Maybe a robot of my father could write a book.

Do you see where this piece is taking you?

Nixon’s Tess is vulnerable enough that you can feel the fear in her eyes, but she is an actress with a core of steel and, indeed, Nixon gets excited when her character realizes, as I think many of us have or will, that this brave new world lacks both safeguards and moral principles. Burstein is just as effective as her husband Jon, his warm eyes dancing with empathy, although we’re not always so sure, given his programming skills. “Am I supposed to not notice that she’s nicer to that thing than me?” » Tess snaps at one point, raising another important issue in AI.

Squibb, 96, whose Broadway career dates back to her role as Electra in the original 1960 production of “Gypsy,” is relentlessly excellent. For the record, she is the oldest actress to ever open a show on Broadway.

Comparisons will surely be made to another Broadway show about robots, “Maybe Happy Ending,” a very fine musical that also uses them as a proxy for a study on mortality. The singing robots, however, have degraded batteries. Those in “Marjorie Prime” seem to last forever; It’s humans who die first.