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.
