Artificial intelligence is moving so quickly it’s hard for the theater to keep up. Take Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which debuted in London in 2023. Three years ago we might have needed a primer on “algorithms,” which we get early on as this way-we-live-now relationship melodrama, with a high-tech gloss, takes shape. Today our online lives are run by algorithms, no matter how much we try to opt out. (Don’t you just love how Google automatically hands your requests over to its AI helper? Me, neither.) But I gave Stein the benefit of the doubt, at least at first–what his play asks is what if we gave our entire lives over to algorithms?
The show transpires on an immaculately polished lightbox-type set, pulsing with data, ambient music, and fancy computer stuff, that bisects the seating area Off Broadway at the Pershing Square Signature Center. For much of the first act we’re looking in on a dinner party attended by old college friends, couples who’ve done well in New York City…but not well enough to think that they might be doing better. They are Ben (Conrad Ricamora), a Columbia professor, and his psychoanalyst wife Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson); magazine art director Paul (Joe Tippett) and lawyer Jill (Elizabeth Stanley); and surgeon Barry (Jason Ralph) and house-hunting spouse Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio). Party giver Nick (John David Washington) is a tech bro who has done very well…but he might be doing a lot better should he shake loose some funding from his pals for his latest innovation, a Waze-like hack for life that can course-correct human behavior and make the absolute right choices for us all. Needless to say there are catches–the $500,000 minimum investment is one, the fact that Nick is a flashy, shady character another. (A third is Nick’s partner, Emma Kikue’s coldly analytical, algorithm-like Raven, whose name alone is a flashing red light.) And there’s more to the story, as Nick and Raven are quietly beta-testing the product on the group, who are seduced, ruined, and “reformatted,” as it were, by the experience.
The manipulations should make for a queasy moral thriller, akin to Neil LaBute plays like The Shape of Things. But Stein doesn’t want to wound, as the couples are forced to confront harsh truths about the courses they think they’ve set for themselves, and what they’ve suppressed to stay on their uncomfortably comfortable pathways. A problem with the show, directed with some verve but little introspection by Hersh Ellis, is that nothing that happens to these rom-com-level characters is terribly surprising, as their relationships teeter. (Not always for the worse; one ends up more pleasantly reborn, a relief for her and the audience, who want to strangle her first-act caricature.) You don’t need AI to see most of what’s around the second-act bend, not when so much of the dialogue is soft-edged platitudes glibly expressing anxiety about our media-mediated lives. And I certainly didn’t need the clairvoyance of a lifemaxxing ChatGPT, just Playwriting 101, to foresee one character saying, of Nick’s machinations, “It’s like we’ve made a deal with the devil.”
That didn’t compute. Nor did a change of heart regarding one character, and a last minute switch to pontification after so much burbling. But maybe I’m spoiled–after the excellence of the recent Birthright and The Saviors here I was at a typically mid summer show, neither great nor awful. Playing upper middle class types the cast fulfills the two-dimensional material, and Stanley does better than that in the showiest role. (While Washington is a veteran of the cinematic techno-thrillers Tenet and The Creator he lacks the charisma of his dad Denzel, and his deviltry is toothless.) The busy data center of a set, a collaboration of scenic and costume designer Zoë Hurwitz, lighting designer Reza Behjat, sound designer Caroline Eng, video designer Yana Biryükova, and prop designer Samantha Shoffner, is fun but like the play itself monotonous. In a time of technological tumult Disruption isn’t disruptive enough.
Comments