Making its US debut three years after its London premiere, Andrew Stein’s Disruption faces the typical battle of the topical play: even with the most expedient fast-track to production, works tackling current events are in danger of obsolescence upon arrival, often left at the mercy of the latest update, for better or worse. As far as plays dealing with AI go, New York got Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal in 2024, which condescended while saying next to nothing about ChatGPT plagiarism, and was marred, for me, by news of star Robert Downey Jr’s $100m Avengers payday. And earlier this year, the tech-industry moral quandary of Matthew Libby’s Data received bone-chilling boosts from unfolding reports of Palantir’s work with ICE.
Stein’s play has to do with the vast amounts of personal information we freely hand over to our tech overlords, and how it could be leveraged against us. It is well-constructed, briskly directed by Hersh Ellis, and with handsome scenic and costume designs by Zoë Hurwitz – both of whom also worked on its 2023 iteration. But aside from a late development that echoes last week’s jump-scare that an OpenAI tool went rogue, any insights it offers about our present moment are either naively outdated or mired in its overcomplicated web of characters. Charitably, one could chalk this up to the three years lapsed since its premiere; 30 lifetimes in cyberland. But lines like “Data’s the next frontier,” or “Technology has made us so connected to everything except ourselves,” would not have stood a chance in 2010.
What this Off-Broadway production has best going for it is an absurdly talented cast representing some of the city’s best and most versatile actors. They’re paired off in appealing ways and it’s quite fun, to reference another archaic technology, to watch them bounce off each other like a DVD screensaver. Stein efficiently sketches their milieu and subtle differences as they prepare for a night out: Ben (Conrad Ricamora) and Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson) are a chic, uptown match, debating whether to vacation in Machu Picchu or the Galápagos; Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and surgeon Barry (Jason Ralph) wear athleisure and live in Brooklyn, but are regretful they passed on a $3m brownstone; and on-the-rocks Jill (Elizabeth Stanley) and Paul (Joe Tippett) stress over whether they can make the last train home to Westchester.
All are in their late 30s, early 40s, and don’t seem to like each other very much any more, but are gathered for dinner by their old friend Nick (John David Washington), a mega-successful entrepreneur, in town from San Francisco with a business proposal and a mysterious younger colleague, Raven (Emma Kikue). Why the wives all come in resisting Nick’s plan, which he’d intimated in advance, is never really defined, but they successfully (for now) prevent their husbands from investing in his venture, which Nick terms “Waze, but for your life” – an AI-driven algorithm to assist with any and all life decisions.
ChatGPT has come a long way since the play’s inception, and the fact that Nick’s idea is no longer novel could be forgiven had the play explored it more thoroughly. Instead of leading his characters into some version of AI psychosis, though, Stein pivots to a sort of blackmail plot that is compelling in its own right, but whose late arrival jerks the concept in a different direction. The idea is that the secrets to which our smart devices are privy could readily be weaponized, but it jostles for air with the tangle (and, it turns out, incestuousness) of this octet’s dynamics.
I admire a production like Disruption, which hands a top-notch cast adult, contemporary material. (Any chance to watch Elizabeth Stanley flex her comedic muscle is a boon.) Rushing to meet headlines might always yield hasty results, but at least we can be grateful that, in its messiness, Stein seems defiantly anti-AI.
