Exclusive: June Squibb, 96, in Marjorie Prime

June Squibb is back on Broadway — and making history.

The Oscar-nominated actress is leading the cast of the Second Stage Theater’s production of Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist play Marjorie Prime, about a woman with dementia who interacts with a holographic companion programmed to resemble her deceased husband.

PEOPLE has an exclusive first look at the production, which is directed by Tony Award nominee Anne Kauffman.

Now in previews at the Hayes Theater in New York City ahead of an opening night of Dec. 8, the science fiction drama also stars two-time Tony winner Cynthia Nixon, Tony winner Danny Burstein as well as Promising Young Woman breakout Christopher Lowell.

But it’s Squibb who finds herself in the record books. At 96, she’s the oldest performer to open in a Broadway show in history.

It’s not her first time on the boards, either. The actress, beloved for her role in Nebraska, made her Broadway debut in 1959 as the stripper Electra in the original production of Gypsy opposite Ethel Merman.

“I moved a lot differently then,” Squibb told PEOPLE at the New York City premiere of Eleanor the Great on Sept. 24, laughing as she recalled her Gypsy days. “I was doing a lot of bumps and grinds every night… Not so many bumps and grinds now.”

Still, Squibb — who was last onstage in Waitress in 2018 — will have plenty of action around her. The production photos, snapped by the famed Joan Marcus, offer a glimpse inside the intense, intimate play, which explores what gets lost when memory is outsourced to a machine.

Nixon, 59, plays Marjorie’s daughter Tess. The longtime stage veteran — known to television audiences as Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City and And Just Like That…, as well as Ada Brook in HBO’s The Gilded Age — was last seen in the 2017 revival of The Little Foxes, which earned her one of her two Tonys.

Burstein plays opposite Nixon as Tess’ husband, Jon. A theatrical giant in his own right with 20 productions to his name including Moulin Rouge! The Musical, Fiddler on the Roof and Company, the actor, 61, was last on Broadway in the Audra McDonald-led revival of Gypsy.

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Lowell, meanwhile, is the newbie of the bunch, having made his Broadway debut in last season’s Cult of Love. The 40-year-old actor embodies Marjorie’s late husband Walter, who appears as a highly sophisticated digital “Prime” of his younger self.

This is Harrison’s first Broadway credit. His play was first staged in 2014, and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Squibb, it turns out, saw the piece over a decade ago and fell in love with it. “It’s a wonderful play,” she told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek in November. “Reading it again was very exciting, really.”

The rehearsal process has brought up lots of questions for Squibb about life, legacy and what one hopes to leave behind.

“Annie Kaufmann, our director, does a really great job of turning to June and asking her these difficult questions,” Nixon explained to Wontorek. She’ll say, ‘What do you think about death? Do you think about it a lot? Are you afraid about it? How do you want to die? Do you want to die in your sleep? Do you want to die with everyone around you? How do you react in the ways at which, as an old person, people treat you like you’re a child?’ It’s really interesting to get her take on all those things.”

And what is Squibb’s take on all that? Well, the legend says she’s enjoyed the discussion.

“I am not upset about being this age. I am not afraid of it,” she said. “I figure, ‘When I go, I’ll go.’ I just, I’m living my life, it’s as simple as that.”

She also has no plans to slow down, having said many times that retirement is simply “sitting for a day.”

So in a play about memory, what does Squibb want to be remembered by one day? “That she had a good time,” Squibb told Wontorek. “She had a good time in New York, and she had a good time in Los Angeles.”

That kind of attitude is why her costars have loved the experience of collaborating with Squibb.

“She’s just incredible,” said Nixon. “This is the age that I met her, but I think if I had met her at 40, she would have been this incredible.”

“Working with her is just a dream come true,” added Lowell. “I’m literally working with a legend of stage and screen. What’s not to love?”

Tickets of Marjorie Prime are now on sale.