Why "Disruption" Really Turned Me Off

The love-hate relationship so many of us have with technology in general and AI in particular purports to be the main subject of Andrew Stein’s Disruption, which opened this week at the Pershing Square Signature Center. It’s obviously a timely topic so I’m sorry to have to say that my overall response to the way the play deals with it tilts toward the negative end of the critical spectrum.

Disruption centers around a thirtysomething tech entrepreneur named Nick, who has come up with software that aggregates all the data most of us already willingly share online—the stuff we buy, the subjects we Google, the comments we post—and puts them through an algorithm that determines which life choices an individual should make to be happy. And then it sells that information to companies who want to make a buck off of it.  

This probably sounded cool and futuristic back in 2023 and the play did draw raves when it debuted in London that year. But technology moves fast and people are now regularly consulting ChatGPT, Claude and their ilk on all kinds of things from what kind of couch they should buy (that would be me) to how to confront a friend about a long-held grievance (not me; that’s what shrinks are for). So the play’s shock value now arrives somewhat diminished.  

I can’t really blame Stein for that but it also doesn’t help that his knowledge of the tech world seems no deeper than a Wikipedia synopsis of it. However getting into the kind of nitty-gritty about exactly how the algorithm might work and what its ethical implications would be is not what truly interests the playwright. For his drama kicks off when Nick invites his oldest and closest friends to a dinner where he offers them the opportunity to invest in his new venture and become filthy rich just like him. 

The $500,000 entry fee Nick quotes hardly seems enough to be a rounding number in his billion dollar project. But it turns out that Nick doesn’t really want his friends' money; what he wants, without telling them, is to use them as guinea pigs to test out his software. And that was another red flag for me:  why didn't Nick and his brainy business partner Raven just go the conventional route and recruit volunteers or college students as their subjects? 

I suspect the reason is that Stein is simply more interested in exploring the woes of being an affluent Millennial. Nick’s friends are three couples—a college professor and his psychotherapist wife debating whether to have a kid; a magazine editor and his lawyer wife debating the best way to get their kids into a top prep school; and a surgeon and his photographer wife debating whether they can afford a seven-figure Brooklyn brownstone. 

All are in thrall in one way another to their millionaire pal Nick but they’re so sketchily drawn that it’s hard to care about any of them. A few background details—one is secretly gay, another has slept with a spouse other than their own—are thrown in but then are almost immediately discarded.

Luckily, director Hersh Ellis has recruited a top-notch cast of actors who find nuance and texture between the lines they've been given to say. The standouts for me were Irene Sofia Lucio, feisty, funny and sexy as the photographer and Conrad Ricamora giving such a grounded performance as Nick’s best friend the professor that I almost wished the play had just been about him (click here to read an interview with him). 

The weak link for me was John David Washington as Nick. Many reviewers have praised Washington’s innate charisma and his movie-star presence is clearly helping to sell tickets but his performance failed to actually show me how someone who so professes to love his friends could so easily sell them out.

Yet, perhaps the most egregious thing for me is the play’s end. Despite the otherwise fine performances and this production’s snazzy set— a glossy black box that sits runway-style with the audience seated on both sides and video projections running along the floor and walls to mimic the algorithm’s calculations—it's not clear what message Stein wants to get across. But the soul-disrupting one that I took away from his play is that what brings happiness is not just money but lots of it.

 

"The Saviors" Confirms Its Author's Talent

It is such a relief to have discovered that the young playwright Bubba Weiler is not a one-show wonder. I was knocked out by his debut Well, I'll Let You Go when I saw it last year (click here to listen to my conversation about it with Weiler) and so I worried when I heard that the Atlantic Theater Company had so quickly scheduled another play of his called The Saviors because sophomore productions are often cursed by unrealistic expectations. 

The Saviors, now playing at Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater, seems to have been created first and it isn't as polished or revelatory as Well, I'll Let You Go, but it is still an engrossing work with impressively complex characters and really substantive things to say about faith and friendship, the forgiveness of sins and the stories that both we and organized religion tell in our efforts to make sense of it all.  

The entire play takes place in the sanctuary of a Catholic church in an unidentified midwestern town and David Zinn has recreated a wonderfully authentic setting, complete with stained glass windows and the slightly scary Baroque effigies that peer down on the altar. The fact that the theater itself is in the reconverted parish hall of an actual church only adds to the verisimilitude. For The Saviors' narrative centers around two of the fictional church’s altar boys, best friends Michael and Paul. They’re 13 and 14 and preparing for their upcoming confirmation ceremony and their overall passage from boyhood into manhood. 

Michael is the more exuberant and seemingly more devout, while Paul seems slightly reserved and more thoughtful. There is an obvious—if carefully unacknowledged—sexual tension between the two and I thought at first that this might be another coming out story. But Weiler, who himself was once an altar boy and who is now happily married to a man, is too gifted a playwright to settle for that alone (click here to read about the genesis of his story). He complicates his story with the arrival of a shabby stranger who stumbles into the church claiming to have once been an altar boy there and now seeking refuge from a winter storm and more. 

Despite his piety, Michael wants to send the man whose name is Julian onto a homeless shelter blocks away. But Paul not only insists that Julian stay and sleep in the church but he returns later with food and to share stories about Julian’s past and about Paul’s concerns about his future. Meanwhile Michael seeks comfort in a recently widowed church volunteer named Judy whom he admires and wants to impress because everyone in the church has heard the stories about the missionary work her son is doing in Africa.  

That’s a lot to cram into 90 minutes particularly when the storylines start to tangle but Weiler and his director Jack Serio deftly knit it altogether in a way that is entertaining and ultimately heartbreaking (click here to read more about how they collaborate). They’re aided by a superb cast. Both playwright and director were determined that the boys should be played by actual teens and they—and their casting people—somehow found two young gems. 

Ivan Howe as Michael and Julius Rinzel as Paul are delightfully gawky in the play’s early humorous scenes where the boys horse around, racing to see who can snuff out the most candles, putting one another in headlocks and trading gruesome stories about tortured saints. But they’re even more impressive in the later  dramatic scenes that call for their characters to express, often without words, the contrasting love they feel for one another and the confusions that are roiling inside them.

The adult cast is excellent too. Stanley Simon's Julian is the classic fuck-up who wants to do good but Simon also makes it clear that Julian knows that he will fail again and again.  And Crystal Fox is a marvel as Judy. She initially seems to be the play’s comic relief but Fox quietly shows how this woman knows the shortcomings of good intentions. Her final moment of truth is truly devastating.

All four of them are trying in one way or another to save at least one of the others and in the process themselves. But, particularly in the play's powerful climactic scene, Weiler seems to be saying that our sins can only be forgiven when we forgive the ones that are committed against us.