The marriage of Paul (Joe Tippett) and Jill (Elizabeth Stanley) is on shaky ground in Andrew Stein’s Disruption.
Enter a complex query into an AI chatbot, and the computer program will ruminate. Employing a proprietary algorithm, actions will be taken, decisions will be explained, and the sometimes unexpected results will arrive in due course, with little regard as to whether a satisfying answer is justification for the steps taken to reach it. This process is the metaphorical framework for Andrew Stein’s new and disturbing think piece, Disruption. Set in a New York defined more by its data sets than its landmarks, three couples provide the input for a calculating friend who employs an omniscient technology to rewire all of their lives.
Suzie (Shaunette Renée Wilson) has suspicions about her husband, Ben (Conrad Ricamora).
Nick (John David Washington) is in some ways your run-of-the-mill evil billionaire industrialist. He has a powerful henchman, ominously named Raven (Emma Kikue), who in this case is a young woman with a Harvard doctorate degree in applied math and artificial intelligence. Having created a super-algorithm to steer humanity toward perfection, the pair are in need of some test subjects to work out the kinks, and what better guinea pigs than Nick’s college friends, all now in their forties with lives that are good but maybe not good enough. Given the quintillion bytes of data at Nick’s disposal, he can all but forecast their future, and thus reshape it, while in moments of doubt, Raven is there to finesse the project onward:
We’re the lighthouse, not the iceberg. And no one has a gun to their head. We’re just letting them know there’s traffic ahead and they might want to take a different route. A better route. We’re expanding their visibility.
The friends, generally unaware of how they are being manipulated, as their free will grows ever more compromised, give off a decidedly Three Little Pigs vibe. In the shakiest of the households, Paul and Jill (Joe Tippett and Elizabeth Stanley) struggle to keep their marriage together in the wake of an unsatisfying Westchester lifestyle. They want their kids to go to a pricey kindergarten while Paul toils in that most dying of industries, magazine publishing. Jill, jittery and insecure, is just waiting for Paul to have an affair. Nick needs only an Instagram post and a promise of vast wealth to blow their house down.
Mia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Barry (Jason Ralph) are still in love. Photographs by Emilio Madrid.
Barry and Mia (Jason Ralph and Irene Sofia Lucio) maintain a stronger relationship in their Brooklyn domicile. Still, Barry, a successful surgeon, longs for his more satisfying Doctors Without Borders days and Mia is obsessed with buying a brownstone. Nick and Raven employ slightly more complicated machinations to disrupt their trajectory.
At the top of the heap, a.k.a. Manhattan’s Upper West Side, sit Columbia professor Ben and his psychoanalyst wife, Suzie (Conrad Ricamora and Shaunette Renée Wilson). Seemingly carefree, cracks in their foundation are ultimately exposed, with Ben harboring a deep, if clichéd, secret, and Suzie falling prey to Nick’s scheme, even as she realizes what is at stake: “We’re being lulled into submission. And programmed. That’s what’s happening. We’re losing the ability to think for ourselves.”
With the exception of one horrific outcome (a system kink no doubt), everyone ultimately ends up rich and happy, while Stein’s often clever writing makes clear that manipulation, compromise, and a worrisome future go along with arriving at this “little slice of heaven.” In the most contemporary of circumstances there dwells the oldest of pacts, a deal with the devil, with Nick ascending to godlike status to drive home the conceit.
When it comes to character development, however, Stein’s writing proves more binary than multifaceted. Under the direction of Hersh Ellis, the talented cast sometimes must slog their way through overly long scenes, or struggle to find depth. Lucio seems trapped in Mia’s brownstone-buying frenzy, and Kikue’s Raven is all business. Wilson’s Suzie is well-crafted before taking a less-than-believable pivot. Washington fares better as Nick, skillfully keeping the sincerity of his friendships an open question.
The creative team, including scenic designer Zoë Hurwitz and video designer Yana Biryükova, do a fine job in breathing life into the play’s most frightening character, the algorithm itself. The audience sits on either side of a traverse stage, staring back at one another to reinforce the idea that one is always under surveillance. The set is housed within a polished black rectangular tube with rounded corners, like a giant iPhone in landscape position. As the actors tread across its shiny surface, video displays on the floor come alive to indicate that information is being processed, personal data slipping right out of their character’s shoes to feed the all-knowing computerized brain.
Andrew Stein’s Disruption plays through Sept. 27 at the Pershing Square Signature Center (480 West 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit disruptionplay.com.
Playwright: Andrew Stein
Direction: Hersh Ellis
Sets & Costumes: Zoë Hurwitz
Lighting: Reza Behjat
Sound: Caroline Eng
Video: Yana Biryükova
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