(clockwise from top): Andrew Garman, Amelia Workman, and Julius Rinzel Photo by Emilio Madrid

What's it about? The lengthy subtitle, A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities, clues us in. Two elegantly dressed women (Kristen Sieh and Amelia Workman) greet the audience, amply amplified by Christopher Darbassie's forceful sound design, which normally would annoy the heck out of me. But not this time, for as we quickly learn, these women, W1 and W2, aren't women. They're post-mortal technological wonders in a human-free universe–robots, or maybe the next step beyond robots, maintaining the museum of the subtitle for the edification of other androids. They bring up human concepts–time, space, food–and ask us, as androids, to imagine them. "We know the humans had museums themselves, for understanding the dinosaurs," posits one. "Well, now they are the dinosaurs."

And they guide us, or the androids they imagine us to be, through key moments in human history as they see it–beginning with, of all times and people, 1816, when Percy and Mary Shelley are conversing around a campfire with Lord Byron, anachronistically: "I'm bored, who else is bored?" We wonder why this would be a key moment, and we won't find out till fadeout. But from there it's a quick hop across the centuries, to 1910 and 1978, and a whole bunch of other years up to 2240.

At first the stops in time seem arbitrary and unthreaded, but then Harrison builds a series of scenes in a given year, and throughlines emerge. They're not always easy to keep track of. The 1910 vignette deals with the early dangers of industrialization and workers' perhaps misguided acceptance of them. In 1978, Stuart (Ryan Spahn) is trying to invent Robbie, a robot on wheels; he'll eventually succeed, and Paul Steinberg's whimsical scenic design is a help in realizing Robbie, but something tragic will happen to Stuart that will affect his sister (Sieh) and nephew (Julius Rinzel, an unusually natural and winning child actor). The actors switch identities so relentlessly that it seems a waste of space identifying them in every guise; the others are Cindy Cheung, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis, Layan Elwazani, and Aria Shahghasemi. All do well.

Some other snapshots, though not all of them: 1994, a nuclear family crowding excitedly around a boxy home computer while the dial-up modem whistles and wheezes. 2000, a funeral for a promising young college student–an affecting thread, but it seems only peripherally related to Harrison's technology thesis. 2014, a startup meeting about the potential wonders of AI. 2031, an actor who got a nose job to increase her marketability against the CGI performers now flooding Hollywood, and her writer sister competing with AI scribes. 2076, four humans strategizing about the onslaught of androids (or, as they call them, "inorganics"), who appear to be out to obliterate humanity. And 2240, an agrarian setting looking like the 19th century, where two of the few remaining humans are contemplating propagating the race, and here's where Ann James' intimacy coordination comes in.

A full menu, no? Harrison possibly could have left out one or two throughlines, for his main argument becomes clear fairly early on: Humanity is in danger of innovating itself right out of existence, and never even mind global warming. You wonder how fully he believes this, and where he'd draw the line: Does he mean computers and the internet have been such destructive forces, we never should have invented them? Maybe. But it's indisputably a thought-provoking premise. And we're lucky to have David Cromer, who co-directs with Caitlin Sullivan, on board to provide his customary attention to detail. Stage directions in Harrison's script–"lightly mocking," "'like that'll do anything'"–emerge loud and clear. Kudos, too, to Tyler Micoleau's lighting, which accentuates the mood of the moment and adjusts smartly to whichever year we're in.

It's a funny play, too, with humans from various eras bitching and riposting and using their language cheekily, in contrast to the unemotional, just-the-facts W1 and W2 and other inorganics. The Antiquities may not have much new to say about the creeping terror of technological progress, but it says it eloquently, and it's likely to spark debate about where we're headed and what we're to do about it. Let's keep that debate alive, while ones and zeros haven't utterly replaced us, and while we still can.