June Squibb sparkles opposite Cynthia Nixon in a futuristic drama, and Michelle Williams loses her way in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winner. Appropriately enough, Jordan Harrison's déjà-vu-inducing "Marjorie Prime" has been here before. The Off Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons produced the poignant sci-fi play about hyperrealistic re-creations of the dead--so-called Primes, which are used as a supportive technology for the bereaved--in Anne Kauffman's spirited, delicately comic production, back in 2015. Lois Smith, then eighty-five years old, played Marjorie, a woman struggling with dementia. 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.

While screenwriters strike, partly over the threat from artificial intelligence, playwrights are busy writing about AI. Lauren Gunderson's Anthropology is the second world premiere in a week featuring pseudo-humanity – after Alan Ayckbourn's Constant Companions – and the third such London play in six months, following Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime and Andrew Stein's Disruption. Gunderson, an American whose I and You was a 2018 Hampstead success, creates Merril, a software engineer, whose sister Angie has been missing for a year after failing to reach home one night. From the phone, laptop and online footprint the young woman left behind, Merril sculpts a virtual Angie. The early scenes are a Merril duologue with a disembodied voice, like a digital Krapp's Last Tape, but Gunderson and director Anna Ledwich sensibly open up this closed circuit so that we see three, or by some counts four, others.

Imagine you have the chance to bring back someone you love. Someone you never thought you'd see again. But the only way you can do this is by implanting memories into a bot designed to look and speak like that person, designed to help you cope as your own memories fade away. And which memories would you opt to keep … and or forget? These are just a few of the questions raised by Jordan Harrison's Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, Marjorie Prime, a fascinating and deeply human meditation on life, loss, memory, and how technology interweaves itself between all three.

In her final months, she finds solace in an artificially intelligent holographic recreation of her late husband Walter, called "Walter Prime." They talk every day, recounting special moments of their life together. But her memory isn't perfect, and Walter Prime can only rely on retellings to piece together what happened. He also talks to other people, including Marjorie's daughter Tess and son-in-law Jon, who move in to take care of her. From all his exchanges, Walter Prime gathers various information on how to play his part, and pieces together a history shared between all the characters that he refers to in his conversations.

Despite humanity's astounding technological advances, the one thing that we've never been able to invent our way out of is our own mortality. But what if you never actually had to lose the ones you love? That's the premise of upcoming sci-fi flick Marjorie Prime, where advances in AI make the human grieving process a thing of the past. Struggling to come to terms with the death of her husband, the movie's main character, Marjorie, uses a computer program to immortalize him as a piece of AI. With Madmen's Jon Hamm playing the protagonist's hunky holographic husband, the trailer gives us a glimpse into how Marjorie's daughter struggles to come to terms with seeing an AI version of her late father.

Can human consciousness be replicated or fabricated by science? The play, which continues through Oct. 23, is a timely offering for those whose interest in artificial intelligence was piqued by another recent production on a Boston-area stage. Many of the themes explored in "Uncanny Valley" are similar to those explored in The Nora Theatre Company's production of "Marjorie Prime," which has just completed its run at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge. And just like "Marjorie Prime," this play didn't quite seem to close a dramatic circuit around the idea of self-aware machines. "Uncanny Valley" fails to close the gap between the intrigue of core questions about human (artificial or otherwise) identity and tangible insights regarding those questions.