If you’re panicking about how insidiously intrusive artificial intelligence is becoming in our lives, prepare for an associated incoming cloud: all the plays, books, movies and TV shows about how insidiously intrusive A.I. is becoming in our lives.
In January, Matthew Libby’s Off Broadway drama “Data” wove a personal and political drama around the use of A.I. surveillance technology in immigration. “Dreams of Violets,” a fully A.I.-generated docudrama, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. Now, Andrew Stein’s play “Disruption” imagines the rollout of an algorithm designed by a mega-rich tech entrepreneur, Nick (John David Washington), who describes its potential in large but vague terms. The play, directed by Hersh Ellis, opened Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
“It helps people navigate their lives,” Nick says. “Make better decisions about the stuff that really matters. Think Waze … but for your life.”
With his younger business partner, Raven (Emma Kikue), Nick smarms his way around his longstanding friend group — three married couples in their late 30s and early 40s — to see if he can secure their financial backing. His friends are snugly within New York’s moneyed class, though nowhere near as Croesus-adjacent as he. None of the couples in the play, which premiered in London in 2023, know that Raven and Nick have been observing their online activities to build a picture of their lives, desires, frustrations and vulnerabilities, which they weaponize against them.
The couples are all facing pivot-moments. Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and her husband, Barry (Jason Ralph), a surgeon, are debating whether to buy a Brooklyn brownstone, and they mull property and money relentlessly. Mia’s sister is Jill (Elizabeth Stanley), whose marriage to Paul (Joe Tippett) is fractured; she is an exhausted parent, he an adulterer.
Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson) is a psychoanalyst married to Ben (Conrad Ricamora), a meek-seeming Columbia professor. They’re contemplating having a child. Suzie immediately and correctly impugns Nick’s cravenness. “He’s Kryptonite to marriage,” she observes. “Deep down, it kills him to see anyone happy.” However, Washington plays Nick as more mercenary than vindictive.
The audience, split into two sections that face each other, observes the action in a hollowed-out lozenge of a stage designed by Zoë Hurwitz. Minimal decoration conveys interiors. Words, numbers and geometric lines bloom on surfaces (projections by Yana Biryukova) to convey the algorithm’s dystopian omnipresence.
The play’s title derives from how Nick defines his mission: “We’re disrupting the way people think.” Yet this static drama feels less edgy than aimless and familiar. No new lines of inquiry around artificial intelligence are mined. The group doesn’t believably gel as friends. The play mirrors our own shrug-emoji fatalism when faced with A.I.’s seemingly unstoppable power and influence.
There are some witty exchanges. When Barry complains to his friends that, as a surgeon, it’s “messed up” that he can’t afford to buy a house, Ben adds dryly: “In Brooklyn, for millions of dollars.” Paul chips in: “With a $20,000 stove.”
Barry and Mia’s airless and relentless to-and-fro about the price of properties defies empathy. Even Paul and Jill’s collapsing marriage rings hollow, as we haven’t seen them functioning as a couple. Suzie is the one-woman Greek chorus denouncing A.I.’s “erosion of free will” and the public’s being “lulled into submission. And programmed.”
She might be right, but the play positions her as party buzzkill rather than voice of truth. Washington animates Nick’s smiling malevolence with a bristling swagger, an Iago whispering poison into every ear, and Stanley and Lucio share a touching chemistry as two loving but competitive siblings. Otherwise, the characters are more types than individuals, their emotional peaks and troughs too abrupt to feel earned.
A late battery of twists — a kiss, a death, a baby — doesn’t help connect us to Nick, Raven or the couples. At random moments, the cast walks in robotic formation (as unwitting slaves to the algorithm?). A final scene about how grotesque A.I.’s influence will be for generations born into its maw feels tonally askew.
“Disruption” is, at moments, a thoughtful tribune of alarm and satire. But it is undermined by something simpler: We don’t believe in, or care enough about, its characters. As with the play’s looming monster of A.I., we are, in the end, left adrift in its dark world.
Disruption Through Sep. 27 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; disruptionplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
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